the latter a daughter of David Lancaster, of Orange county, New York. He traced his ancestry back to John Budd, the man who purchased thirty thousand acres of Indian lands in 1660 and erected the first buildings in Westchester county, New York. His ancestral line includes John Budd, 1600-1673 ; John Budd, Jr., 1620-1684; Captain Joseph' Budd, who died in 1722, and Sarah Underhill ; Joseph Budd, 1702-1763; Joseph Budd III, who died in 1772, and Elizabeth Griffin ; Griffin and Katherine (Sutton) Budd; and Joseph and Maria (Lancaster) Budd. Among his ancestors who served in the Revolutionary war were Andrew Sutton, John Griffin, David Lancaster and Joseph Budd.
In early childhood Joseph L. Budd was taken by his parents to Monticello, Sullivan county, New York, where he was reared to young manhood, pursuing his education in Monticello Academy. About 1855 he came to the middle west and accepted the professorship of a boys school at Galesburg, Illinois. Subsequently he was engaged in business with H. Fuller, at Wheaton, Illinois, and about 1858 became a resident of Iowa, purchasing in the vicinity of Shellsburg a large farm, which the family still own. There he established the Benton County Nursery and successfully continued in that business until called to the faculty in the Iowa State College in 1877. He was elected professor of horticulture in the school at Ames, in November, 1876, and entered upon his new work on the 1st of March of the following year, continuously filling the position for twenty-three years. He was called the "Columbus of American Horticulture" because of what he did to classify and make the subject a permanent science. The success of his work may be shown in the fact that in the year 1900 fully seventy-five per cent of the men filling similar positions in American colleges were either his "boys" or men who had received their inspiration from this pioneer, and the department of agriculture at Washington was ever eager to obtain the services of men whom he had trained. He was a pioneer plant breeder and experimenter of this work, beginning his labors along those lines as early as 1870. The work of importation and experimentation with Russian and other European fruits was begun at the Iowa State College in 1878 and so continued until he resigned in 1900. During the summer of 1882 he was sent to Europe by the governments of the United States and Canada to study horticultural problems, especially the Russian fruits. Charles Downing, the pioneer pomologist of New York, willed his horticultural library of three hundred volumes and all his private papers of a technical nature to Professor Budd, with instructions that they were to go to the college when Mr., Budd was through with them.
Professor Budd was a prolific writer who never lacked in material for an interesting article in the Iowa State Register and Leader, or in the various horticultural and scientific periodicals to which he was a frequent contributor. He had a host of readers who always received, with interest, the reports of his investigations and experiments. He continuously contributed articles to the Iowa State Register from 1872 until 1909, there