Fonds SC44 - C.W. Nash fonds

Charles William Nash (1848-1926) was the biologist for the museum of the Farmer’s Institute Bureau of the Ontario Department of Agriculture, and later the Provincial Biologist at the Ontario Provincial Museum. Born on August 15, 1848 in Bognor, Sussex, England, Nash came to Canada in 1869. In 1873 he founded a game and fish protective association in Hamilton, an unusual organization for the time given the abundance of game. Nash married Harriet Burns Campbell on February 13, 1877, and in the 1880s moved to Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, where he practiced law in addition to carrying out nature observations. He contributed many bird observations to Ernest Thompson Seton’s Birds of Manitoba. In 1887 the family returned to Ontario where Nash took up the study of biology full-time. In 1899 he became a lecturer in biology at the Farmer’s Institute Bureau of the Ontario Department of Agriculture and later, a biologist with the Ontario Provincial Museum. During this time he published extensively, as well as serving as a judge for the natural history exhibits at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. Among his publications are a number of checklists of Ontario birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish, each including a catalogue of specimens in the Biological Section of the Provincial Museum. He was a member of the Ottawa Field-Naturalists’ Club and the Ornithological Subsection of the Biological Subsection of the Canadian Institute. Nash died on February 13, 1926, in Toronto, Ontario.