Thomas Howell spent 21 years on his book, A Flora of Northwest America, published in Portland in 1903. This rich result of a patient man's toil originally sold for $5 and at the time of its publication he was eager for customers and badly in need of them. Fortunate now, however, is the collector who can find a copy for $5. The whole tremendous task of making it he performed himself—he gathered the flowers and plants from all over the Pacific Northwest, he classified them and described them, and then he learned to set type and printed the book. Even its poor typography endears it all the more to the owner of a copy who knows the labor and sacrifice that attended its production. It is a volume of 816 pages, and "is the only work in existence in which descriptions can be found of all plants, shrubs and trees growing naturally in the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho."
He was born in Missouri in 1842 and came to Oregon with his parents in 1850, living the first winter on Tualatin Plains and then removing to Sauvie's Island. There, in 1853, he went to school for three months, the only schooling he ever received. From early boyhood he was interested in plant life and began his serious collecting in 1877. He was married to Effie Hudson in 1892, when he was 50, and about that time opened a small grocery store in the town of Clackamas. About 1900 he moved to Oak Grove, and in the later part of his life kept a store on Hood Street in South Portland. From the time he conceived the plan of a complete flora for the three states of the Pacific Northwest, he devoted to it all the money he could save and all the time he could take from making
