J. Louise Mastrantonio papers

J. Louise Mastrantonio was born Sept. 1, 1938 as one of a pair of identical twins in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, where her family lived in rural poverty. A graduate of McKenzie River High as well as the University of Oregon’s journalism program, Mastrantonio, née McBride and, for a seven-year period, Mrs. Parker, spent her twenty-five-year career (1961-1986) facilitating public outreach with the U.S. Forest Service in California and Oregon. Initially stationed close to home as the first ever public information officer of the Willamette National Forest, Mastrantonio composed public brochures and articles for newspapers and magazines in this role before being transferred Berkeley, CA, in 1966. There she served as an information specialist for the Pacific Southwest Research Station across seven years, publishing her first research pieces during this time which would prove highly influential on the ongoing scientific periodical Forestry Research West.

Mastrantonio’s manifest communication skills earned her the position of speech writer for the Pacific Northwest Regional Forester in 1972, but her commitment to hands-on public engagement drove her to transfer after just a year to the Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland, OR. There, serving as the station’s public affairs officer for thirteen years, Mastrantonio gained extensive experience supervising the elements necessary for publishing research results from across the region’s forests, including the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest within the Willamette National Forest so familiar to her. Mastrantonio’s command of the state of forestry research garnered an invitation to represent the United States at the Eighth World Forestry Congress in 1978, a meeting of 2,000 individuals from 104 countries that took place in Jakarta, Indonesia, to discuss the conservation and management of the world’s forests.

Despite her retirement on Jan. 31, 1986, Mastrantonio remained active, initially working as a freelance writer for several gardening publications. In her writings she describes how her interest in gardening, horticulture, and botany overall stemmed from childhood memories of the garden on which her family subsisted, which her father dutifully tended to daily after each full shift as a miner. Her father’s family had lived in the Willamette Valley since the mid-nineteenth century, and subsistence agriculture had been key to their survival up until the young Mastrantonio’s own lifespan. While remembered for this love of gardening, as well as playing piano, baking, antique dealing, and foraging, Mastrantonio’s curiosity led her to embark on a book-length research project on the key facilitators of home gardening: seedsmen. From approximately 2004 until her death at home in 2011, Mastrantonio conducted as much research on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century seedsmen and seed companies as possible from her home in Manzanita, OR. Initially consulting libraries and archives across the country for copies of relevant materials, she soon became extensively involved in online auctions for historical paraphernalia pertaining to seed companies, with the aspiration to arrange a public exhibition on the historical roots of the industry. This collection, donated by her estate, contains much of her research findings and collecting interests, as well as a number of tangents stemming from both.