3-31-2026 8:47pm

A Memory of Spring

Beth Callahan Editor

A lantern slide depicting Cirsium lanceolatum or Bull Thistle flowers; photo & color by E.M. Kittredge, 1911. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Courtesy of Misti Spillman, Manager, Preservation and Community Outreach Woodland Cemetery & Arboretum. Living here in Warren County, we are fortunate to be between the two larger cities of Dayton and Cincinnati. This allows us to not only share in both of these city's accomplishments, but in their residents. And, believe it or not, one way of learning about these people can often be found in historical cemeteries. Dayton, Ohio's Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum, which is one of the oldest garden cemeteries in the United States, is filled with history. And, this February the WarrenCountyPost.com has been given the privilege to publish a piece from Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum about Elsie May Kittredge.

Elsie May Kittredge was an artist and botanist who preserved and catalogued thousands of plant specimens to create a type of scientific reference called an ‘herbarium’.

Born in Dayton in 1870, Elsie May and the Kittredge family moved to New York City when she was 9 years old. In 1910, at the age of 40, Elsie May Kittredge began to produce beautiful lantern slides for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s illustrated lecture series.

A ‘lantern slide’ is made by creating a positive print of a photograph on a glass slide. These can be presented to an audience using a very real thing called a “Magic Lantern” at the time, and what we might think of as a projector today. For an even more realistic image, color can be painstakingly added in by hand. Once completed, the print is protected by attaching another glass slide on top
of the image.

Rising in popularity as a form of entertainment in the late 19th century, lantern slides were quickly adopted by educators for use as visual aids during lectures. Within two years, Elsie May Kittredge had created 125 such hand painted glass slides for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, who declared that her work possessed “not only rare beauty, but scientific accuracy.

You can see more of Kittredge’s work by visiting the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s website.

In 1917, when the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) was looking for an assistant curator to care for and develop their lantern slide and photo negative collection, Elsie May Kittredge was an ideal choice for the role. Shortly after she was hired, the New York Botanical Garden asked Kittredge to go to Woodstock, VT to assist Elizabeth Billings (secretary of NYBG’s Women’s Auxiliary), with an ambitious project. Billings' goal was to create a collection of every type of non-cultivated plant within six miles of Woodstock’s post office.

Working together, the two women would comb the area for flowering plants, ferns, mosses & grasses for the next 30 years. This collection, known as the Billings- Kittredge Herbarium, is kept by the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park in Vermont. Luckily for us in Ohio, the National Park Service has digitized the entire collection.

Of the 1000+ plants Elsie May Kittredge recorded in Woodstock, many had never before been collected in the state of Vermont—and some, such as the new variety of maidenhair fern she discovered on the Billings’ estate, had never been collected at all [2] .

When Elsie May died in 1954 at the age of 83, she was buried on the Kittredge family’s lot in section 113, lot 115 at Woodland Cemetery.

Pictured: A lantern slide depicting Cirsium lanceolatum or Bull Thistle flowers; photo & color by E.M. Kittredge, 1911. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.