Grace E. Howard
Grace Elizabeth Howard (1886-1978) was an American lichenologist, teacher, and a professor of botany at Wellesley College for twenty-eight years. Early life and education Grace Elizabeth Howard was born in Pennsylvania, and raised in Washington, the daughter of Henry and Elizabeth Howard. As a young woman, she was a passionate climber, accompanying her sister Ann Howard on climbs before she was officially old enough to join The Mountaineers. The sisters climbed Mount Noyes, Mount Queets, and the Middle Peak. In 1917, Howard was one of the organizers of the first Mountaineer Knapsack Trip. This, wrote Stella Degenhardt, was "a backpacking, rather than a pack-horse outing which explored the area from Snoqualmie Pass, via Goldmeyer Hot Springs, Lake Dorothy (with dugout canoe), Skykomish River, and Glacier Basin to Monte Cristo". Howard earned her B.A. from the University of Washington in 1911, and subsequently taught at a school in Wapato, Washington. Ten years later, she returned to the University of Washington for her M.S., and then moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where she pursued botanical studies, receiving her Ph.D. in 1923. Lichenology Howard began teaching at Wellesley College in 1923, where she would remain for the next 28 years. She began to