Cyrus Guernsey Pringle Arizona and Sonora, Mexico photographs

Cyrus Guernsey Pringle (Prindle) was born May 6, 1838, in Charlotte, Vermont, to parents George and Louisa (Harris) Prindle. He briefly attended University of Vermont in 1859 before dropping out to work on his family’s farm. He would later earn an honorary Sc.D. from the University of Vermont as well an honorary M.A. from Middlebury College. On February 25, 1863, Pringle married Almira L. Greene of Starksboro, Vermont; together they had one child, Annie Pringle Wright. They would later divorce in 1877.

By the late 1860s he had become an active member in the agricultural community of New England, and had experimented extensively on cross-breeding fruits and created new varieties, including the Snowflake potato. In 1871, Pringle was elected corresponding secretary of the Champlain Valley Horticultural Society, in Burlington, Vermont. He accepted a collecting job from George E. Davenport in 1872, and it was through Davenport and the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, of which he became a member, that he met and began collecting for Asa Gray. He was appointed to the Vermont Board of Agriculture in 1874, which meant an itinerant agricultural professorship, and in 1878 he exhibited many Vermont specimens at the Paris Exposition.

In 1880, under the direction of Asa Gray and as an agent for the United States Census Department, supervised by Charles Sprague Sargent of the Arnold Arboretum, Pringle made his first trip to the Pacific Slope, west of the continental divide. He was then chosen, in 1884, to take a position in a Smithsonian Institution botanical survey of the north and northwestern portions of Arizona. He would go on to spend the rest of his life collecting specimens for Asa Gray and others in the Southwestern United States and Mexico. Cyrus G. Pringle died on May 25, 1911, at 73 years old.

Mauz K. 2018. C. G. Pringle : botanist, traveler, and the "Flora of the Pacific Slope" (1881-1884). New York: New York Botanical Garden.

Davis HB. 1936. “Life and Work of Cyrus Guernsey Pringle.” Burlington (VT): Free Press Printing Company.