Orin A. Stevens was born on a farm in Kansas in 1885, where he began his lifelong habit of observing birds and bees and plants. It’s fun to imagine little Orin staring cross-eyed at a bug on the farmhouse porch or grasping and smelling a flower before he could even walk.

By the time he reached high school, his interest in nature took a turn toward academic study when he picked up his older sister’s botany textbook. Following high school, he entered Kansas State, and upon graduating with a Bachelors Degree in Agriculture, he was appointed instructor of Botany.

Two years later, 23-year-old Stevens moved to North Dakota to work as a seed analyst in the newly created Seed Laboratory. He was also hired to teach botany at the North Dakota Agricultural College in the fall of 1909 – the first of 67 years he would teach at the school that eventually became NDSU.

Stevens gave his life to the study of plants, bees, wasps, and birds. A tireless observer of the natural world, he “discovered” dozens of plant and insect species. Of the huge collections he amassed, one containing 12,000 bees and wasps is now housed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In fact, scientists around the world so respected Stevens that they began naming species after him.

Though raised on a farm, Stevens’ summers as an adult became filled with a different kind of fieldwork – the scientific kind. Every year he traveled the state to observe and collect specimens. He “wrote the book,” literally, on North Dakota plants—330 pages worth. First published in 1950, the Handbook of North Dakota Plants has not lost its usefulness and is still available through the Institute for Regional Studies at NDSU.

Ever vigilant in searching for new plant species, Stevens one day found a non-native plant growing along a Fargo street in 1909. After studying it, he became one of the first to warn of the invasive weed many North Dakotans have come to despise – leafy spurge. As early as 1919 he wrote, “(leafy spurge) seems to spread freely from the roots and should be watched closely.”

O.A. Stevens’ interests didn’t end with botany and entomology, but included ornithology as well. His “North Dakota Bird Notes” columns were published by the Fargo Forum for ten years, and North and South Dakota Horticulture magazine published some 250 articles he wrote on birds during the 1930s and ‘40s.

Stevens was a dedicated researcher, a keen observer, and a prolific writer. He starting work early in the morning, and even when he was in his eighties, younger people had trouble keeping up with his long stride. Although he officially retired from NDSU, he just kept on working. In fact, when his colleagues threw a surprise party for his 80th birthday, they could barely coax him out of the greenhouse to join them.

NDSU built a new facility for the Sciences in the 1960s and named it Stevens Hall. The O. A. Stevens Memorial Scholarship is awarded annually to outstanding biology majors on the basis of academic achievement and character as exemplified by the distinguished botanist.

Dr. O.A. Stevens served NDSU and the State of North Dakota from 1909 to 1976, when he suffered a stroke. He passed away on this date in 1979 at the age of 93.

Sources:
http://www.lib.ndsu.nodak.edu/archives/ndsubuildings/Stevens/history.html
http://www.lib.ndsu.nodak.edu/archives/collections/Stevens.html
http://www.ag.ndsu.nodak.edu/invasiveweeds/lshistory.htm
Elwyn B. Robinson, History of North Dakota (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1966) 505,

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