Forestry and Environmental Studies

George H. & Alice F. Beatty were a part of the Penn State University community for the latter half of the 20th century. Dr. Alice F. Beatty was a zoology professor at Penn State DuBois whose research focused on the diversity of the order Odonata, which consists of dragonflies and damselflies. The couple were assistant curators at the Frost Entomological Museum at Penn State from the museum’s early days. From the 1940s-1970s, they traveled throughout the northeastern and southern United States as well as on several trips to Mexico, sampling odonates and recording their field observations in notebooks. These notebooks, spanning decades of research, contain records for the approximately 60,000 odonates that they collected.

Reports from the Pennsylvania commission for the investigation and control of the disease (1912-1914). 11 documents reporting the research and work of the Pa Blight Commission

In 1898, three brothers Ernst, Otto and Bernard Behrend along with their father Moritz, formed the Hammermill Paper Company along the shores of Lake Erie, in Erie, Pennsylvania. The archival materials date from the founding through the takeover in the mid-1980’s and describe the growth of the company and changes in the papermaking process.  The papers also touch on topics of cultural interest  and local history such as the 1918 influenza epidemic, the pollution of Lake Erie, and the distrust of German-Americans and their companies during the Nazi era. 

In May 1903, the governor of Pennsylvania established the Pennsylvania State Forest Academy in Mont Alto.  It was one of the first forestry schools in the nation along with the Biltmore Forestry School and the Yale Forestry School. The School of Forest Resources was established in 1907 as the Department of Forestry at The Pennsylvania State College, four years after the start of the Pennsylvania State Forest Academy at Mont Alto. The Penn State program absorbed the State Forest Academy in 1929. 

This collection includes 468 glass lantern slides dating from 1897 to about 1902, apparently used by Mira Lloyd Dock in her lectures at the Mont Alto Forestry School. Many of these photos were taken at Wetzel's Swamp near Harrisburg (now Wildwood Park) but other states and European sites are also represented.

The Donald W. Hamer Center for Maps and Geospatial Information digital map drawer contains the subset of our physical map collection that has been digitized and is not protected by licensing or copyright.