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One of Utah's most prolific and respected zoologists with 407 scientific publications to his credit, Dr. Ralph Vary Chamberlin became, during his seventh and eighth decades, a historian of considerable skill. His
Chamberlin was born in 1879 in Salt Lake City to W. H. and Frances Chamberlin. His home environment was a powerful influence on his development as a scholar. His brother was a Professor of Mathematics and the earth sciences at Utah State Agricultural College and Brigham Young College who became interested in religious philosophy and even did graduate work in that field at Harvard. The brother became a leader among Utahns interested in intellectual freedom. Ralph Vary Chamberlin's first book,
Upon completion of his undergraduate work at the University of Utah in 1898, Chamberlin taught at LDS High School for four years, then received a Smith Fellowship at Cornell, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1904. He joined the University of Utah faculty the following year and became one of the founders of the two-year medical school program, serving as Dean of that school until 1907. In that year he left Utah for the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. For fifteen years Chamberlin was head of the research division in the Department of Comparative Zoology. In 1926 he took up his final academic post as head of the Departments of Zoology and Botany at the University of Utah and served for some thirty years in that capacity.
It was well after his return to Utah in 1926 that he developed the interest in the history of the university that would open up a new career for him and lead to important discoveries and publications in the fields of biography and history. It began modestly in a desire to write a history of the Department of Biology, but expanded dramatically and inexorably as his vigorous intellect continued to pursue causes and themes ever further back in time and outward in geography. The finished product was his massive history of
As a historian, Chamberlin was more of a compiler than an interpreter, but his books are rich mines of information. His long affiliation with the university as both student and faculty member provided close contacts with alumni and former faculty, and his personal memory and experience gave him a knowledge of the important lines of development in the history of that institution. His books are full of pride in the university, generated no doubt both by long association and the rapidly developing professionalism during the presidency of A. Ray Olpin, but Chamberlin is objective enough to recount in detail the university's less admirable moments like the "controversy of 1915," which led to the resignation of several highly respected faculty members and Dean Byron Cummings.
Chamberlin's personal life was somewhat less triumphal than his professional career. Although married to Daisy Ferguson of Salt Lake City in 1899, the marriage broke up after eleven years and four children. Chamberlin remarried in 1922; he and the former Edith Simons had six children. The second Mrs. Chamberlin died in 1965. At age seventy-eight, Chamberlin was honored at a special dinner hosted by his university colleagues, an occasion marked by the presentation of many gifts and awards and the unveiling of a portrait by Professor Alvin Gittins of the University of Utah Art Department. He died in Salt Lake City in 1967 at age eighty-eight.
The Ralph Vary Chamberlin Papers contain virtually nothing on his personal life, education, or scientific and teaching career; instead, they are devoted almost entirely to his research on the history of the University of Utah and related topics. Those related topics range fairly widely, including reading notes on general American cultural history, the history of education, early Mormon and Utah education, and the careers of several people who figure prominently in the educational history of the Latter-day Saints and Utah: John C. Bennett, John Rockey Park, Francis Marion Bishop, and others. There are notes on only one topic not directly related to the history of the University of Utah or Utah and Mormon education: the establishment of the "This Is The Place" Monument, to which Chamberlin contributed research.
Chamberlin's research began with the narrow focus of the history of the biology department and gradually extended outward, both chronologically and geographically. The papers have been generally arranged with the earlier and marginally related material preceding the material on the University of Utah. Most of this earlier material is in the first two boxes, which begin with Chamberlin's correspondence files for the late 1940s and l950s, arranged in rough alphabetical order. Of especial interest are the files of letters from prominent historian Dale L. Morgan regarding the initial Mormon penetration into the valley of the Great Salt Lake and the career of John C. Bennett. This part of the collection also includes transcribed excerpts from the diaries of several Mormon pioneer leaders and polemical comments on the history of the Mormon arrival in Great Salt Lake Valley by Samuel Russell.
The presence in the collection of the diary of Ethan Pettit for the years 1869-78 is not readily explicable, for Pettit seems not to have been involved in any developments of major interest to Chamberlin. The diary, nevertheless, is quite important. Pettit was a member of the Elk Mountain Mission who later settled in the old Nineteenth Ward of Salt Lake City, in the vicinity of Beck's Hot Springs. In the low ground between the springs and the Great Salt Lake, Pettit built fish ponds and made a living selling fish and wild game in Salt Lake City. The diary is an excellent day-to-day account of the life on one of Zion's foot soldiers and superbly documents a rather unusual but productive occupation and an important area of Salt Lake City.
Box 2 contains most of Chamberlin's notes on the history of education. The attached inventory is largely self-explanatory, but attention should perhaps be called to the transcript of the "Daybook of the University of Deseret" found and made available to Chamberlin by Dale Morgan, and the several folders of original school records for Washington County and St. George discovered by Juanita Brooks. The latter documents are of especially great importance. Chamberlin made very little use of them, and they would support a much more ambitious history of education in that southern Utah county than has yet been attempted.
The main body of Chamberlin's research on the history of the University of Utah begins with his genealogical and biographical notes on John Rockey Park in Boxes 3 and 4. Again, a much more extensive use could be made of these notes than Chamberlin was able to accomplish in either the Park book of the university history. Park's personality and career clearly captured Chamberlin's imagination, and the notes include material on the most minute aspects of Park's life, from his genealogy over many generations, to the social background of education in Ohio where Park was born and trained, to the history of Draper, Utah where he first taught in Utah, and the early years of the University of Deseret, which Park shaped into a professionally respectable institution. The Draper notes include diaries and interviews conducted by Chamberlin with older residents, and they embrace a much greater scope than just the Park years there.
The University of Utah notes from Box 5 to Box 8 are the heart of the collection, but they require little explanation. The arrangement scheme in this section of the papers is fairly crude, but it is assumed that with the help of the attached inventory, the researcher interested in specific aspects of the history of the university can locate what he wants.
The biographical files in Box 9 are quite important. Most of them were published in the biographical appendix to the university history, but others are unpublished notes in various states of polish. A complete list of names of those included in these files appears at the end of this register.
Box 10 contains a selection of Chamberlin's speeches and lectures on a wide variety of topics. Most of these are in finished form exactly as delivered, and they illustrate his wide-ranging interests and competence. This part of the collection, too, is the only part containing any evidence of Chamberlin's scientific work and thought.
Ralph Vary Chamberlin Papers, 1940-1967, Utah State Historical Society.
Donated by Dr. Richard E. Chamberlin
The Ralph Vary Chamberlin Papers are the physical property of the Utah Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah. Literary rights, including copyright, may belong to the authors or their heirs and assigns. Please contact the Historical Society for information regarding specific use of this collection.
Register available.
Photograph album entitled "100 Years of the University of Utah" has
been put into