Berch Henry collection

This collection includes the papers of Berch Waldo Henry (1915-1977), who served as the Officer-in-Charge of Southern Institute of Forest Genetics, located in Gulfport, Mississippi, from 1954 to 1964. After his tenure with the institute he went on to become the Assistant Director of the Southern Forest Experiment Station in New Orleans, a position he held until his retirement in 1973. Berch was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, and attended West Virginia University, where he earned a BS degree in Botany in 1936 and a MS in plant pathology in 1938. He furthered his education at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied diseases in oak species and received his Ph.D. degree in plant pathology and physiology in 1941. After serving in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1946, Henry worked as a Plant Pathologist with the War Department at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Henry studied plant pathogens and biological warfare until 1948 when he transferred from the War Department to the Bureau of Plant Industry, an agency under the auspices of the United States Department of Agriculture. The transferal required Berch and his family to move from Maryland to Hattiesburg, Mississippi where the USDA assigned Berch to the W. W. Ashe Forest Tree Nursery in Brooklyn, Mississippi. While working at the Nursery, Berch studied a severe pine seedling root rot complex that endangered the nursery’s future. He was influential in the design and testing of a way to control the disease by soil fumigation techniques that eventually controlled the root rot. In 1953, the USDA absorbed the Bureau of Plant Industry, and Berch was relocated to the Southern Forest Experiment Station located in the Harrison Experimental Forest, Saucier, Mississippi. Shortly after this appointment, he was made the Officer-in-Charge of the Southern Institute of Forest Genetics, a position he held for a decade. While not actively engaged in research at the institute, Berch served as a liaison between researchers, businessmen, and politicians. In 1955, Henry was selected to be a member of the Southern Forest Tree Improvement Committee. Henry’s most lasting contribution to forestry research was the role that he played in the construction of a modern research laboratory building for plant genetics, entomology, and pathology in Gulfport. The laboratory was completed in 1960, and by the 1970s it housed nineteen scientists, who studied genetics and disease resistance. Throughout his tenure with the Southern Institute of Forest Genetics, and his later time with the Southern Forest Experiment Station, Berch worked to improve the quality of southern forests through modern forestry. Henry’s later work with the Southern Forest Experiment Station, from 1964 to 1973, was also largely administrative. He worked in the station’s main offices and retired with more than thirty years of employment for the federal government. He died only four years later, in 1977, following a battle with cancer. He was survived by his wife, Lorie Marie Meyer, of Mayville, Wisconsin, and five children. Henry is buried in the Floral Hill Memorial Gardens in Gulfport, Mississippi.