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Ted Trueblood Collection The Papers of Ellen Trueblood Ellen and Ted Trueblood shared a love of the outdoors. A proficient hunter and camper in her own right, Ellen spent four months in the central Idaho wilderness with her new husband in 1939, one of the most unusual honeymoons on record. They camped, hunted, and fished together throughout their marriage, with their children and later their grandchildren. Just as Ted Trueblood’s papers reflect his outdoors interests, so too do Ellen Trueblood’s. Ellen Rose (Hinkson) Trueblood was born in 1911 in Boise, Idaho. After graduating from high school she embarked on a career in journalism. She was a reporter for the Boise Capital News when she met Ted and continued working as a journalist for several years after they were married. After the births of their sons she wrote occasional feature pieces for newspapers and magazines, but from the 1950s on, her major interest, outside of her family, was the collection and identification of mushrooms and other fungi. It is as a mycologist that Ellen Trueblood made her own unique contribution to the understanding of the natural world. Indeed, mycological work is the focus of her papers. Despite little formal training in mycology, Ellen Trueblood became an expert on the fungi of the arid Owyhee region of southern Idaho. She collaborated with outside scholars in their research, particularly with Dr. Alexander H. Smith of the University of Michigan. She won research grants herself and wrote articles for academic and amateur mycological journals. She was one of the founders of the Southern Idaho Mycological Association. Her papers contain correspondence with mycologists and other collectors, her own writings, files relating to her grant-funded projects, and notes. She discovered several mushroom species previously unknown to science, one of which was named for her. Just as Ellen hunted, fished, and camped with Ted, so did he help her in her mycological work. He accompanied her on mushroom-collecting forays and developed most of the photos that she took.
Besides documenting her mycological interests, the Ellen Trueblood papers also
contain newspaper articles she wrote in the 1930s and 40s.
After Ted Trueblood’s death in 1982, she actively took up the
environmental causes he espoused, particularly that of wilderness preservation.
A record of that work is also preserved in the Ellen Trueblood papers. Ellen Trueblood died in 1994, and her children donated her books and papers to Boise State University. Her collections of fungi were donated to the University of Michigan herbarium. Altogether the Ellen Trueblood papers fill five feet of shelf space in twelve boxes. An inventory with a fuller biographical sketch is available. Return to Table of Contents Return to Special Collections homepage Email: Special Collections Department This page last changed: 22 January 2004 |
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