The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

LAHMAN, BERTHA MARION SHERWOOD (1872–1954).

A botanist and political activist, Marion Sherwood Lahman discovered new species and varieties of cacti in Oklahoma. Born on December 5, 1872, in Tiskilwa, Illinois, to Theodore and Eucla Sherwood, she completed public school in Tiskilwa and in 1897 received a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Michigan. While teaching school in Chicago, she was accepted into the University of Chicago’s botany program, already a pioneer institution in the study of plant ecology, completing a master’s degree in botany.

In July 1898 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she married a former Michigan classmate, Charles S. Lahman. They relocated to Stillwater, Oklahoma Territory, in 1899. A developer of manufacturing facilities, Charles opened Stillwater’s first ice plant, later Southwest Utilities Company, which owned dozens of ice plants, and Midwest Baking Company. The marriage produced one son, Sherwood.

In Oklahoma, Marion Lahman resumed her scientific investigations, making the local landscape her research laboratory. The family relocated to Vinita (1902), Tulsa (1913), and Ponca City (1923) until settling in Tulsa in 1927. Wherever she lived, she studied the flora. The Guthrie Daily Leader of June 4, 1903, published her article titled “The Story of the Territory’s Flower Varieties,” in which she described her growing list of native blooming flowers. She made watercolor paintings of her finds and exhibited the artwork in the Indian Territory Building at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. By 1936 she had listed twelve hundred varieties of blooming flowers in seventy-four of Oklahoma’s seventy-seven counties.

Her field research primarily focused on observing, classifying, and cataloguing Oklahoma cacti. She documented at least forty-eight species in the state, identifying nine that were completely new to science. They include four species in the genus Echinocereus (hedgehog cactus), four species in the genus Coryphantha (beehive cactus), and one new Knieffia (evening primrose, not a cactus).

Lahman’s work received wide notice in the botany world, as featured in the April 12, 1936, issue of the Tulsa World: “Cactus a Desert Plant? Tulsa Woman Proves Oklahoma Real Cactus State.” Sharing her findings internationally, she sent dozens of specimens to the United States National Herbarium and to the Missouri Botanical Garden. In 1936 and 1937 she exhibited her discoveries in London at the annual Royal Horticultural Show. As part of her research design she maintained a large experimental cactus garden at her home in Tulsa and established a cactus bed in Tulsa’s Mohawk Park.

She also wrote for both scholarly and popular publications. Her articles appear in the Proceedings of the Oklahoma Academy of Science, of which she was a member, and in The Cactus Journal. She also contributed articles to National Geographic and Nature magazines as well as Woman’s Home Companion and Harper’s Bazaar. She was a member of the local Writers’ Club in both Ponca City and Tulsa. Her writing interests extended to political articles and also to poetry, which she often published in local newspapers.

A social and political activist, Lahman served on the Tulsa Council of Defense during World War I. After the war she campaigned to organize women’s auxiliary units for the American Legion. Favoring woman suffrage, she lectured, registered women to vote, and distributed her booklet titled “Practical Politics for Women” after the Nineteenth Amendment passed. She also campaigned against crime in Tulsa city government.

She made important contributions to food conservation. In 1913 Gov. Lee Cruce appointed her to a Congressionally authorized commission to investigate European agricultural practices and conditions. Her report lauded European methods and stressed that food production in the United States needed reorganization and soil conservation. After the war she engineered the establishment of a public market where Tulsa’s residents could obtain fresh farm products direct from growers at reasonable prices. Under the auspices of Oklahoma A&M, in the 1920s she created a program of free classes in cooking and food preservation for urban women.

Lahman belonged to many organizations. She chaired the Tulsa County Republican Committee, joined the Tulsa Federated Women’s Club, and helped establish the Ponca City and Tulsa writers’ clubs. Bertha Marion Sherwood Lahman died on February 11, 1954, in Tulsa. Earlier, she had put together an unpublished book manuscript, “Some Cacti of Our Southwest,” dated 1950. These and several of her illustrations of wildflowers are held in the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma.

Dianna Everett