Abstract
Charles Vancouver Piper is remembered today primarily as the first chairman of the USGA Green Section and co-author of the influential Turf for Golf Courses (1917), but his contemporaries knew him as a world-renowned botanist and agronomist whose turfgrass work represented only a fraction of his remarkable career. Born in Victoria, B.C., in 1867, Piper was an avid naturalist from youth, collecting plants near Seattle as early as 1883 and surviving a near-fatal fall into a crevasse during an 1888 Mt. Rainier expedition with John Muir. After studying at the Territorial University and working at Washington State’s agricultural college in Pullman, where he taught subjects ranging from plant physiology to entomology, Piper joined the USDA in 1903 as Agrostologist. Over 23 years there, he made groundbreaking contributions to American agriculture, including introducing Sudan grass, developing the soybean as a crop, authoring the classic Forage Plants and Their Culture (1914), and serving as president of the American Society of Agronomy. Piper’s expertise with grasses naturally led golf course developers to seek his guidance, culminating in the formation of the Green Section in November 1920. As chairman and editor of the monthly Bulletin, Piper combined his directorship of the USDA’s Forage Crops Division with extensive Green Section travel and correspondence, all while continuing his botanical research—even collecting willow specimens during a 1923 visit to Portland golf courses. Though illness limited his final year and he died from a stroke in February 1926, Piper’s vision for the Green Section endured. He had called for expanding the organization with trained assistants who could travel the country providing consultation to golf clubs, recognizing that he and Oakley were ‘growing old’ and needed ‘youngsters trained to carry out the work.’ His desire to put the Green Section ‘on a permanent basis so that its functions of investigation and education might enlarge and endure’ has been realized, establishing a foundation for the modern turfgrass industry.