Summary
The former Lewis Hall is the central building on the Mountain Lake Biological Station (MLBS) grounds, literally holding the place of the Rotunda in a scale replica of the UVA Lawn. It was named for Professor and Dean Ivey Lewis, who led the Department of Biology and cofounded MLBS. Lewis was an outspoken eugenicist, who molded Biology education at UVA in service of his advocacy for eugenic racism, developing UVA as the epicenter of eugenical thought in the South and the nation. In October 2023 Mountain Lake Biological Station and the UVA Board of Visitors renamed the this building after Ruth Myrtle Patrick, a 1934 UVA PhD in Biology who took classes at the Station and went on to become a leading aquatic ecologist, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and lead scientist behind the 1972 Clean Water Act.
Ivey Lewis and Eugenics at UVA
Ivey Foreman Lewis was hired in 1915 by President Edwin Alderman to modernize the biology department and increase its research profile (Dorr 2000). In addition to serving as Chair of Biology, he helped found the Virginia Academy of Science and served as its first president. In 1934 he was appointed Dean of the University, a position that later became Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1946. He served in that post until his retirement in 1953.
Lewis is widely recognized as one of the primary architects of eugenics at Virginia and a vocal leader in pushing for institutional and legal policies based on his interpretation of the “science” of hereditarianism. At UVA, he worked closely with Paul Barringer (Chairman of the Faculty) and Harvey Jordan (Professor of Anatomy and Histology and his Pavilion neighbor on the Lawn) to advise Alderman and grow the faculties of the sciences with eugenicists (Dorr, 2018; 2000). All three men believed in and wrote about the hereditary inferiority of African-Americans and other (non-white) races; Barringer and Jordan have both had their names removed from buildings in the UVA Medical School (the former Jordan Hall was renamed Pinn Hall in 2017 and the Barringer Wing at the Medical Center was renamed the Collins Wing in 2019) (Reynolds, 2020).
As Chair of Biology, Lewis had a special impact through his role in determining curriculum for all Biology majors for many years. As the flagship research university in the south, UVA trained a disproportionate number of pre-medical students who went on to become medical professionals throughout the country. Biology was consistently among the largest majors in the College in Lewis’ time. Every one of those majors and hundreds of other students had to pass through Lewis’ Biology C1: Evolution and Heredity, which surviving notes show was primarily based in what was known as scientific racism – topics and assignments included Nordic superiority, the economic and social burden of inferior people, “racial decay”, and “negro assimilation” (Dorr 2000).
These themes of racial purity and the social impact of its decay were the basis of Lewis’ claims of scientific justification for anti-miscegenation laws. Lewis supported Walter Plecker in establishing the infamous 1924 Racial Integrity Act that barred interracial marriage and established the “one-drop” rule as a legal definition of whiteness (Dorr 2018, 2020). Lewis continued his advocacy for racial separation and segregation and used his scientific and University credentials to enforce these views throughout his career. He publicly and vehemently fought desegregation at UVA and in public education more widely (Leidholdt 2014). In what was apparently one of his last public lectures, he gave an address to the largest scientific society in the nation, the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) as outgoing vice president of its botany section in 1951. The address was entitled “Biological Principles and National Policy”, and so outraged the audience and members of the society that AAAS refused to publish the address in its journal Science (despite the customary publication of such addresses) (Dorr 2000).
Lewis Hall and MLBS
Around 1929, Lewis and Professor Bruce Reynolds began teaching summer biology classes out of cabins at the Mountain Lake Hotel atop Salt Pond Mountain in Giles County, VA. This period coincided with the establishment of Woods Hole Marine Laboratory in Falmouth, MA, which was to become one of the most important biological institutes in the world. Lewis sought to establish for the University an “inland answer” to Woods Hole, where biologists could meet, conduct research, and teach students. That mission persists today, when MLBS remains one of the premier terrestrial field stations where students, faculty, and other scholars live, learn, and work side-by-side in both a physical and practicing version of Jefferson’s Academical Village (Lewis and Young 1936).
In 1930, Lewis arranged a long-term lease with a local landowner, John B. Laing, to use the current property associated with MLBS (the boundaries of the lease have changed a bit, but the descendants of Mr. Laing continue to lease the property that the Station sits on to the University for $1 every 50 years). Lewis served as Director of MLBS from 1933 -1946. In 1934, he moved the Station to the first buildings on the leased land, built with a grant from the General Education Board (Lewis 1936). Later construction was developed in a 0.375 scale replica of the Lawn in Charlottesville, with the laboratory and classroom building known as Lewis Hall in the place of the Rotunda and dormitory cottages lining the Lawn (Lewis and Young 1936; Office of the Architect, UVA 2008). The former Lewis Hall was completed in 1939 as a WPA project.
Ivey Lewis saw MLBS as a place to establish the primacy of southern cultural and scientific contributions. Lewis solicited suggestions for preeminent “pioneers in Southern biology” as namesakes of the buildings at the Station, dedicating one cottage to each “southern state” by naming it after an early scientist associated with it (Lewis 1936). Throughout Lewis’ term as Director, Station brochures invited all “white men and women” to apply for classes.
A New Name – Ruth Patrick
All science buildings and residences at MLBS are named for white males associated with “the South”. The new name for the central building on MLBS grounds breaks that tradition to honor a pioneering female scientist with a connection to both UVA and MLBS, Ruth Myrtle Patrick.
Ruth Patrick was one of the earliest women to earn a PhD at UVA in 1934 studying the biology of diatoms, a group of algae that make elaborate silica casings. During her graduate study, she took classes at MLBS. After her graduation from UVA, she applied for a position at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and was told she would not be paid (and that she should not wear lipstick to work). She was appointed curator in 1937. In 1945 she was first paid for her work. For the first 11 years of her career, she was expected to work for free because of her gender.
Her impact on limnology, botany, and the environmental movement was immense. She established the Department of Limnology at the Academy, building collections of aquatic specimens and surveying waterways through the mid-Atlantic region. This work led her to propose and demonstrate a concept that all biologists and environmental scientists now take for granted and that forms the foundation of all environmental assessment to this day. The so-called “Patrick Principle” was the first recognition that biodiversity is an indicator of water quality and pollution. Over her career, she became known as the leading authority on diatoms in the world. She advised multiple presidents on the impacts of water pollution, acid rain, and aquatic conservation, and was a leader in formulating the 1972 Clean Water Act.
Her role as a scientist, teacher, mentor, and role model as a leading woman in science earned her countless awards and honorary degrees. Most significant among these are election to the National Academy of Sciences (1970) and the American Philosophical Society (1975), along with the Presidential Medal of Science in 1996.
Key Readings
Dorr, G. M. 2018. Segregation's Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville.
Dorr, G. M. 2000. Assuring America's Place in the Sun: Ivey Foreman Lewis and the Teaching of Eugenics at the University of Virginia, 1915-1953. The Journal of Southern History 66:257-296. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2587659#metadata_info_tab_contents
National Academy of Sciences. 2014. Ruth Patrick 1907-2013. Biographical Memoirs. http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/patrick-ruth.pdf
Additional Cited Literature
Leidholdt, A.S. 2014. Showdown on Mr. Jefferson's Lawn. Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 122 (3): 230–271.
Lewis, I. F. 1936. Mountain Lake Biological Station Prepares for Seventh Season. University of Virginia Alumni News. January 1936.
Lewis, I. F., and C. F. Young. 1936. Mountain Lake Biological Station. Virginia Journal of Education 29:361-362.
Office of the Architect, UVA 2008. Mountain Lake Biological Station, University of Virginia. Landscape Assessment and Recommendations.
Reynolds, P.P. 2020. UVA and the History of Race: Eugenics, the Racial Integrity Act, Health Disparities. UVA TODAY January 9, 2020. https://news.virginia.edu/content/uva-and-history-race-eugenics-racial-integrity-act-health-disparities
Zauzmer, J. 2013. Ruth Patrick, ecology pioneer, dies at 105. Washington Post September 23, 2013. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/ruth-patrick-ecology-pioneer-dies-at-105/2013/09/23/2bcde762-245e-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html