Professor Ernest Everett Bogue

Ernest Everett Bogue (M.S., A.M.) was born January 12, 1864 at East Orwell, Ohio. He matriculated at Ohio State University, earning a B.S. in Horticulture and Forestry in 1894, and a Master of Science in Entomology and Botany in 1896. That same year he married Myra Viola Wilcox of Columbus, Ohio, and took an appointment as head of the Department of Botany and Entomology in the Oklahoma Territorial Agricultural and Mechanical College at Stillwater (now Oklahoma State University). After teaching for four years he resigned in 1901 to attend Harvard University, from which he received the degree of Master of Arts in June 1902.¹

The Michigan State Board of Agriculture in 1902 established a new “school of forestry” at M.A.C., with the intent to make it “as distinct as either the school of agriculture or engineering.” On September 1, 1902, E. E. Bogue began his appointment as the first Professor of Forestry at M.A.C.,^† traveling on that day to study the Experiment Station tree plantation at Grayling (planted by the Botany department in 1888). Professor Bogue hit the ground running, taking departmental control of the wooded areas now known as Sanford Natural Area and Baker Woodlot and working to improve those with judicious cutting of over-mature trees and planting of new ones. By June 1903, a mere nine months into his tenure, his department had already planted some 7,300 trees on college land. Bogue traveled extensively throughout the state for forestry education outreach, taught classes that expanded rapidly in enrollment thanks to “his skill, originality, ingenuity, and genial ways,” and established experimental projects in cooperation with the departments of Chemistry and Entomology. Meanwhile, Myra Bogue is said to have been “active in the community,” a wildly dismissive understatement.²

Ernest and Myra first lived in a house on College Delta today known as the Landon–May House. In 1905 they moved to a new home on a large lot situated adjacent to campus, east of the street that now bears his name. It was on the north bank of the Red Cedar River, across from the westernmost portion of the woodlot “back of field № 7” (i.e. Sanford Natural Area). He quickly set to work making this property into his own personal arboretum, a beautifully landscaped area with a wide diversity of plantings that many called “Bogue’s Woods.” A description of the site that appears in Beal’s History is taken, uncited, from an obituary of Bogue in The Bryologist bimonthly journal, which explains its uncharacteristic effusiveness:

For the beautiful home erected, he selected a congenial spot near the papaw bushes, sloping to the bank of the Red Cedar where the dam below made a delightful place for rowing for over a mile in extent. Pitcher plants, orchids, and numerous wild plants of his selection occupied suitable spots between the house and the river. With excellent judgment, he selected a nice variety of trees to plant about his new home, among them a fine grove of Norway spruces, with the view of furnishing Christmas trees to the neighborhood when they should attain suitable size. The chief charm of the location, as he rightly viewed it, was just across the river on the farm, a virgin forest of maples, beeches, basswoods, elms, and others delighting in such surroundings.

Bryologist, p. 61. Beal, p. 450.

After a protracted illness due to appendicitis, Ernest E. Bogue died at age 43 on August 19, 1907, “in the midst of a promising career of usefulness, as a man, as a citizen and a teacher.”

Myra Bogue continued to be an important part of the community and the school for many decades to follow. She was a charter member of Peoples Church and taught Sunday school there for twenty-six years. After Ernest’s death she joined the college staff as a clerk for a handful of different departments, then became director of bulletin distribution for the School of Agriculture in 1910. She remained in that role until her retirement in 1938 at age 75—with, in the official tally, 30 years of service to Michigan State. Throughout those years, she opened her home at 239 Bogue Street (described in her obituary as a “big, brown three-story house” but appearing in Sanford maps to have been a typical wood-framed foursquare) as a rooming house, and “hundreds of young men have been among ‘her boys,’” many of whom kept in touch long after their graduations. She died at age 89 in February 1951.³

The Bogue house was demolished circa 1967, and the entire Bogue’s Woods site (now bordered by Bogue Street, Waters Edge Drive, and the river) has been redeveloped into student apartment blocks and a large parking ramp.⁴

1. Bryologist, 12(4), July 1909, p. 61. ↩︎
2. Beal, pp. 143–144. 42nd AR (1903), pp. 42–46. Bryologist, 12(4), p. 61. Kestenbaum, p. 116. ↩︎
3. LSJ, 10 Feb 1951, p. 2. Sanborn (1951), p. 272. ↩︎
4. Bryologist, p. 61. ↩︎

1. † William Beal‘s full title from 1882 to 1902 was “Professor of Botany and Forestry and Curator of the Botanic Museum”—Forestry because the field had developed at M.A.C. as a sub-discipline of Botany. When in 1902 the Department of Forestry was created (under mild protest from Beal), Ernest E. Bogue was appointed Professor of the newly independent department. This site therefore counts E. E. Bogue as the first Professor of Forestry at M.A.C. [Beal, pp. 143–144]↩︎