Hazel Schmoll
American botanist (1890-1990)
Hazel Marguerite Schmoll (1890–1990) was an American botanist, and the first to conduct a systematic study of plant life in southwestern Colorado. She was also the first woman to earn a doctorate in botany from the University of Chicago. She was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 1985.
Early life and education
Hazel Marguerite Schmoll was born in a sod cabin in McAllaster, Kansas, on August 23, 1890, to William and Amelia Schmoll. The family moved to Ward, Colorado when she was two, where her father set up a livery stable. Schmoll showed an early interest in learning about wildflowers and spent much time roaming the area on horseback collecting specimens and picking berries. She described her childhood in Ward as ideal and retained a lifelong connection to the town, which shrank to less than a dozen residents in the 1940s before rebounding in the 1960s.
Schmoll attended Ward School through eighth grade, followed by the State Preparatory School in Boulder (an earlier incarnation of Boulder High School). She then went to the University of Colorado Boulder, from which she graduated in 1913 with a degree in biology. She taught for four years (1913–1917) at Vassar College, first in the biology department and then in the botany department.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hazel Schmoll” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.