F.O. CONANT’S OTHER HOBBY (WINTER 2025)

 

Conant family members including descendants of Roger Conant surely have a great debt to Frederick Odell Conant, pictured left. A History and Genealogy of the Conant Family in England and America, Thirteen Generations, 1520-1887, containing also some genealogical notes on the Connet, Connett and Connit Families was the mammoth 640-page book that he wrote, aged only 30 when the work was published in 1887
A resident of Portland, Maine, he had a successful career in the family grocery business. 

What is not generally known is that his hobbies included mycology as well as genealogy. 

He kept a handy and thorough record of some 46 species of mushrooms that he encountered in the summer of 1901, making sketches and taking notes as to the physical characteristics of the fungi. 

The entire collection of sketches is being offered for sale by the Daniel Oliver Gallery. 

The care and love, the curiosity is evident on every page, notes the Gallery, with wonderful levels of detail and attention paid. 

Specimen No. 6 includes a cross section with a hollowed out tunnel reading ‘eaten by worms’, and No. 22 includes a note reading ‘Hygrophorus? No, don’t think so’. 

No. 28 focuses on the head of the phallus impudicus, the common stinkhorn, including two cross-sections with every aspect of the anatomy identified. You can find more details via this link:  https://danieloliver.gallery/artworks/907-frederick-odell-conant-collection-of sketches-by-an-amateur-mycologist-in-1901/


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