Ralph Millard Sargent and Louise Alexandria Anderson Sargent

Ralph Millard Sargent and Louise Alexandria Anderson Sargent and Their Family Contributions to the Highlands Biological Station and Highlands, North Carolina

In Honor of Lydia Sargent McCauley and Her Lifelong Support of HBS

As part of our ongoing research about the Highlands Biological Station (HBS), the papers of Ralph M. Sargent and the Sargent family have been cataloged for our Reinke Library Archives. Most were donated in the past few years by Sargent’s daughter, Lydia Sargent McCauley, who still lives in Highlands. In addition, there is a transcribed oral history with Hugh Sargent, Lydia’s brother, who continues to visit Highlands in the summer.

Lydia and Hugh have been coming to Highlands since at least 1939, when they were 7 and 5, respectively, and grew up loving Highlands just as their parents, Ralph Millard Sargent and Louise Alexandria Anderson Sargent, did. The papers were cataloged by archive volunteer Diane Lennox in 2023–2024. They consist of 143 documents spanning from 1930 to 2022, but primarily between Ralph Sargent and HBS Director Thelma Howell from 1943 to 1947.

Dr. Ralph Millard Sargent

Ralph M. Sargent was born on May 10, 1904, in Mower, Minnesota, the son of Charles James Sargent (1872–1932) and Katherine Fox Sargent (1875–1963). By 1910, the family had moved to Red Wing, Minnesota, where his parents continued to live for the rest of their lives.

Ralph attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, graduating in 1925, and earned a doctorate at Yale University by 1931. He married Louise Alexandria Anderson in 1929 at the Andersons’ home, Tower Hill Farm, in Red Wing, Minnesota. He returned to Carleton and taught from 1931 to 1934. In 1941, the family moved to Haverford, Pennsylvania, where Ralph became a Professor of English (specializing in Elizabethan and American literature) at Haverford College. He also served as an editor for the Haverford Review and was department chair from 1949 to 1962, retiring in 1970.

A short list of his publications includes At the Court of Queen Elizabeth (1935), Books of the Renaissance (1952), As You Like It (1959), Peter Kalm’s Travels into North America (1972), Biology in the Blue Ridge (1977), and The Spirit and the Intellect (1983).

Although Ralph was clearly a literature scholar, his avocation was botany. He had a deep interest in botany and conservation, serving as Vice President of the Philadelphia Botanical Club and participating in various botanical organizations and efforts. Other important papers of note by Ralph include The Flora of Satulah Mountain (1965) and Plant Heartland: Highlands, North Carolina as a Center of Endemism (1982). He assisted his friend Carlos C. Campbell with Campbell’s book, Great Smoky Mountains Wildflowers (1970), by providing slides of various flora published in the book. Their correspondence is also in the HBS Archives.

Dr. Alexander P. Anderson and Louise Alexandria Anderson Sargent

Louise Alexandria Anderson was born in Chicago on November 21, 1904, to Dr. Alexander (Alex) P. Anderson (1862–1943) and Lydia McDougall Johnson Anderson (1876–1934). She graduated from the University of Chicago and received her master’s degree in zoology. She was on the faculty of Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut.

Louise’s father, Dr. Anderson, entered the University of Minnesota in 1890 to study agriculture and earned a master’s degree in plant physiology in 1897. In 1895, he studied with leading botanists at Munich University, earning his doctorate there. From 1896 to 1899, Anderson taught at Clemson Agricultural College (now Clemson University) in South Carolina and served as the state botanist. He met his future wife, Lydia, there, and they married in 1898 in Highlands.

In 1901, he became curator of the New York Botanical Garden at Columbia University, where he conducted research that led to his invention of puffed rice while experimenting with starch crystals in his lab. Anderson started the Anderson Puffed Rice Company in 1905. In 1915, Alexander and Lydia returned to Red Wing, where he built a laboratory at Tower View Farm and continued to work for Quaker until 1941. Over his 35 years of research, he conducted more than 15,000 experiments. His invention of puffed rice made him a nationally known figure and the face of a Quaker Oats advertising campaign for nearly a decade.

Highlands: The Summer Home for the Andersons and Sargents

The Andersons built a large, landscaped mansion on 5th Street in Highlands between 1906 and 1909. It boasted a barn, ice house, sheds, a clay tennis court, and a rare windmill that pumped water from the well to the kitchen and second-floor bathrooms. Louise Anderson Sargent spent every summer in this Highlands house until she was 17 years old.

In 1931, Louise convinced Ralph to spend their first summer in Highlands. In 1939, they bought the property they had been renting and continued bringing their children and other family members for most summers thereafter. The Ralph and Lydia Sargent Family Preserve, located next to HBS, has been in a conservation easement with the Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust since 1996. Louise’s father was one of the founding members of the Highlands Improvement Society, now the Land Trust.

Ralph wrote in 1977 that when he and Louise climbed Satulah Mountain in June 1931, “I came upon my first sights of Flame Azalea in bloom. I knew I had seen the most colorful mountain shrubs in America. My love affair with Appalachian flora began at that moment.”

Contributions to the Highlands Biological Station

The Sargents became deeply involved with the Highlands community, particularly the Highlands Biological Station. Ralph took botanical field trips with self-taught botanist Henry Wright, and they became lifelong friends and conservationists.

Ralph gave numerous lectures, often using his own slides of flora from Highlands, Pennsylvania, and beyond. He frequently spoke about 18th-century botanists John and William Bartram’s travels in both Highlands and Pennsylvania. His lecture notes, along with details about when and where he spoke, are preserved on notecards in the Reinke Library Archives.

Ralph’s official role at HBS began in 1941 when he was appointed Secretary of the HBS Board. His responsibilities included maintaining membership records, producing an annual report on museum and laboratory activities, and publishing research from the Station.

In 1944, Ralph, Henry Wright, and Thomas Harbison collaborated on landscaping around the new museum, a project that eventually led to the development of the Highlands Botanical Garden. By 1947, the Board of Trustees officially tasked them, along with H. R. Totten of Chapel Hill, with identifying property for a garden. That year, Dr. W. C. Coker resigned as President of the Board, and despite being absent due to wartime duties, Ralph was elected President.

In 1976, Ralph was elected an Honorary Trustee of HBS. The citation noted that he had been an officer of the corporation for 35 years and was instrumental in saving the institution from dissolution in the 1940s.

HBS established the Ralph M. Sargent Memorial Scholarship in his honor following his death in 1985. Louise passed away in 1998. Their gravestone reads, “Friends, Scholars, Teachers, Naturalists.”

A Family Legacy

Louise Sargent was President of the Board of Trustees of The Hudson Library for four years in the late 1940s. At HBS, she supported Ralph’s work, attending meetings and writing reports in his absence. She chaired the Museum Activities Committee for many years and generously helped wherever needed.

Lydia Sargent McCauley continues her family’s legacy, having co-authored The Highlands Botanical Garden: A Naturalist’s Guide with James Costa in 2012, illustrated with Ralph’s slides. She has also donated correspondence and documents to the Reinke Library Archives in recent years.

Today, Liz Sargent, Ralph’s granddaughter and Hugh Sargent’s daughter, carries on the family tradition as a member of the Botanical Gardens Committee. As a landscape architect, she contributes her expertise to the gardens’ development and volunteers whenever she is in Highlands during the summer.

-Bryding Adams, Volunteer Archivist, March 2025