To a betting man the chances his future would include raising three of the next generation’s most prominent geneticists would have seemed more remote than Stewart’s farm did the day the 10-year-old arrived.
On Dec. 17, 1939, the Springfield Daily News repeated what future vice president and then U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace said about Harrison Shull.
“No man in the United States has ever made a record equal to that of the Pennsylvania Dutch orphan with his five sons so uniformly distinguished.
“He lived a hard life, and when he died, his estate amounted to only $3,000,” Wallace said. “His invisible estate, however, was much greater, for there were his six sons and one daughter, each of whom worked his way through college, and five of the sons are now listed in ‘Who’s Who in America,’ four again listed in ‘American Men of Science’ and one of the last four listed in ‘American Men of Art.’”
Wallace’s failure to mention Shull’s wife and the children’s mother, Catherine Ryman Shull, seems nearly unforgivable today.
But after quoting Wallace, Farm Editor John T. Brown’s story turned to the Shulls’ most famous son, corn hybrid developer George Harrison Shull, to fill the void.
The founder of the academic journal “Genetics” said his mother’s thirst for knowledge, independent mind and strict moral principles helped her leverage a third grade education into a scientific knowledge of botany she passed along to her children.
And the book “Rainbow Fragments” about the Shulls’ artistic sons, it described an essential thing Mrs. Shull passed along to her the next generation.
“ … she nurtured her brood in the green fields of Ohio, instilling into her sons and daughter that love of nature that has dominated them ever since. Her garden gave joyously of its increase and though but a memory now, it still blooms undimmed in the widely separated gardens of her scattered friends and children.”
The Shull children endured the hardscrabble existence of farm life but benefited both from the inheritance of their parents’ natural intelligence and nurturing.
Four of the boys were born in the eight years the Shulls spent as tenants on the William Winter Farm near North Hampton. After that, Brown writes, Harrison Shull and his family “experienced the fate of hundreds of landless men who were driven from pillar to post.”
After seven years of wandering, the Shulls establish themselves as sharecroppers on the 155-acre Allen farm on Montgomery County’s northern border with Clark County.
“During those years,” Brown writes, “it was the rule that a member of the Shull family should have the highest scholastic standing in the two-room elementary school at Sulphur Grove,” which is not far from the current Carriage Hill Metropark.
“Each member of the family attained that distinction in turn as the next older member completed his elementary education and withdrew.”
George Harrison Shull’s description of his father’s traits, on a par with his mother’s, provide the basis for the family’s high expectations: “He was a man of splendid moral principles, an abstainer from alcohol and tobacco, an early advocate of woman’s suffrage, a member, and in the latter half of his life, a minister of the Old German Baptist Church,” a group still referred to by some as Dunkards because of their traditional style of baptism.
The Daily News’s report included brief sketches of the Shull children in the order of their birth and baptism, supplemented here with additional information from other sources.
• John W. Scholl, born Aug. 17, 1869, became an associate professor of German at the University of Michigan, his interest leading him to change “Shull” into “Scholl” to reflect the family’s Germanic origins. Made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa for his achievements as a critic and poet, Brown adds that “during the war of 1914-18, (Scholl) contributed notable letters tot the New York Times in which he advocated complete identification of German Americans with American interests and ideals.”
• George Harrison Shull, born April 15, 1874, not only developed hybrid corn but founded the journal “Genetics” while teaching at Princeton. His work ethic was such that he never took a sabbatical in 27 years, followed up a working vacation away from Princeton by doubling his class load when he returned, and eventually was honored with the National Academy of Science’s Marcellus Hartley Medal.
• J. Marion Shull, June 23, 1872, was the last of the boys born near North Hampton and did not amass the academic credentials of the others. Still, he was a botanist and an artist who illustrated both botanical texts and pamphlets for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and did floral artwork for popular magazines. Continuing his mother’s interests, he developed new varieties of irises, including his Morning Splendor, first recipient of the silver Medal of the American Iris Society.
• Charles Albert Shull, Jan. 19, 1879, the second youngest of the Shull children “undoubtedly … had more influence than any other on the development of plant physiology in this country,” according to a tribute to him in Plant Physiology, yet another academic journal a Shull brother founded.
•Arthur Franklin Shull, Aug. 1, 1881, spent 40 years teaching zoology and genetics at the University of Michigan, reports Brown, “and is the author of three outstanding textbooks on animal biology, heredity and evolution.” He also did research at the nation’s most prestigious field laboratories: Cornell University, the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass., and Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, where brother George did his corn hybrid research.
The career of Samuel Shull “holds not the luster of his five brothers,” writes Brown, but the rise of a boy with limited formal education to a superintendent of schools in multiple districts in Ohio and Indiana stands out.
The article points out that Harrison and Catherine Shull’s lone daughter, Elizabeth Shull Bissett, also became a teacher before marrying.
The next generation of Shulls continued the tradition.
George Harrison Shull’s son Harrison became a physics professor prominent enough to merit a National Academy of Sciences memoir; Charles Shull’s son, Sherman Kingsley Shull, got his Ph.D. from MIT and did research for Westinghouse; A. Franklin’s daughter Elizabeth Shull Russell rose to prominence as a cancer researcher and became president of the Genetics Society of America; and Samuel’s son, Charles W. Shull, earned a Ph.D. at Ohio State University and taught political science.
As Brown put it in 1939: “One could search in vain in recorded history to find a record of achievement to duplicate that of the Shull family. It is a success story of seven children who without the advantages of high school education burned the midnight oil to fit themselves for college – a story of steadfast purpose and courage, of arduous manual work to defray college expenses, of self-denial and rigid self-discipline, of a slow but sure climb to ever higher parts in educational and scientific fields.”
Theirs might be a case study in what nature and nurture can do.
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