Llewelyn Williams papers

Llewelyn Williams (1901-1980) was an economic botanist, wood technologist, and an authority on plants that produce latex used commercially for gums and rubbers.

He was born in Conway, Wales and obtained his B.Sc. (1924), M.Sc. (1935), and D.Sc. (1963) at the University of Wales, specializing in tropical American woods and forest products. In 1928 he did post-graduate studies under Dr. Samuel J. Record of the Yale University School of Forestry. In the course of his career he collected and studied latex-bearing plants and other rainforest products in tropical regions throughout the word for scientific and commercial purposes. He conducted extensive field investigations in the Amazon, Caura, and Orinoco River basins of northern South America, and later traveled to Africa, Southeast Asia, India, and the Philippine Islands.

From 1924 to 1926 he managed a 700-acre tea estate in Assam, India before receiving an appointment as Dendrologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois. His career at the Field Museum spanned 26 years (1926-52), where he was Curator of Economic Botany from 1938. During this time he undertook several assignments on leave of absence, as Research Botanist for the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry of Venezuela (1938-40; 1941-42) and as Senior Field Technician for a U.S. government agency, the Rubber Development Corporation (1942-45). The latter assignment was an emergency World War II project to recruit and train rubber-tappers to locate and extract Hevea rubber in the Upper Orinoco River valley.

After the war he conducted fieldwork (1945-55) for the Dreyfus Corporation, a Wrigley Chewing Gum Co. subsidiary, to locate natural sources of gums, rubber, resins, and waxes in tropical forests. He remained a consultant for the Wrigley Company on tropical forest products from 1956 to 1960. In 1961 the USDA recruited Dr. Williams for an appointment as Senior Economic Botanist, Crops Research Division. In this capacity he was engaged in research (1963-67) on the effects of chemical defoliants with the USDA Agricultural Research Service under contract with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (U.S. Dept. of Defense). Dr. Williams conducted an intensive study of forest and agricultural zones, including aerial reconnaissance, in Thailand and other countries of Southeast Asia, and he published a comparative study, Forests of Southeast Asia, Puerto Rico, and Texas (1967). In 1966 he participated in a USDA project under the auspices of the International Agricultural Development Service to evaluate agriculture and forest resources in the Republic of Dahomey, Africa.

Llewelyn Williams was a seasoned explorer, a world authority on botanical products of tropical rainforests, and a man firmly dedicated to his Welsh heritage. He did his own photography and amassed a substantial collection of photos that document the extraction and processing of gums, rubbers, resins, and related material from tropical plants. He published hundreds of scientific articles and industrial reports on wood species and products based on firsthand field investigations and surveys. He was a member of the International Association of Wood Anatomists from its founding in 1930 and Secretary for the Society for Economic Botany. Dr. Williams died in 1980, at the age of 79.