Samuel Mills Tracy

After receiving his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Michigan Agricultural College, Samuel Mills Tracy became  an agriculturalist, a professor of botany at the University of Missouri, and the first director of the Mississippi Experiment Station.

Particularly interested in grass taxonomy, plant breeding, and forage plants, he donated his collections of roughly 10,000 Gulf Coast plants, along with his library, to Texas A&M University in 1917. This gift formed the nucleus for what later became known as the Tracy Herbarium.