Ira J. Condit
American botanist, horticulturalist and university teacher (1883–1981)
Ira Judson Condit (1883–1981) was an American horticulturist who studied subtropical fruits, including the fig, the olive, and the avocado.
Early life and education
Ira J. Condit was born November 18, 1883, in Jersey, Ohio, and graduated from Granville High School in 1900. He went on to Ohio State University, where he received his B.S. in 1905. After more than a decade working in various horticulture-related jobs, he returned to school, earning an M.S. from the University of California (1928) and a Ph.D. from Stanford University (1932).
Career
After leaving college Condit spent a year in Washington, D.C., at the Division of Entomology in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Between 1907 and 1912, he was an instructor in horticulture at California Polytechnic School, San Luis Obispo. While teaching at the polytechnic, he met Caroline Callender, and they married in June 1912.
In 1913, he moved to Berkeley, California, where he joined the College of Agriculture as an assistant professor in citriculture. He began to study subtropical fruit, subsequently publishing research reports on cultivation of the avocado (1915), carob (1919), oriental persimmon (1919), and loquat (1915). He kept track of avocado cultivars in the state, and these efforts, together with his avocado report, were instrumental in helping to establish the economically important California avocado industry.
“Ira J. Condit” enters the record as american botanist, horticulturalist and university teacher (1883–1981). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Condit, American and botanist can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16749861. VIAF identifies the subject as 48837124. The Library of Congress control number is no97068753. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1883, 1981, 1900 and 1905.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ira J. Condit” 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.