Charles Mohr - Back in The United States

Back in The United States

At the end of 1857, he opened the first German pharmacy in Mobile, Alabama whose business development was hurt by the outbreak of the American Civil War. The confederate government tasked him with examining the medicines for their army. During the course of the war, his pharmacy was destroyed once, but he immediately built it up again. Despite these troubled times, Mohr continued his botanical work and contributed a collection of mosses from southern Alabama to Lesquereux's 1884 work Mosses of North America. In his pharmacy laboratory, Mohr began examination of fertilizers and minerals, as well as exploring the woods of Alabama for commercial timbers and other valuable natural resources. The results of this work was publicized in 1879 under the title "The Forests of Alabama and Their Products".

On behalf of the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., who took notice of Mohr's work, he undertook a wide-reaching forest-botanical study. Aside from this, he was busy working for Harvard University and other institutions, giving talks at large congresses and conducting a topographical examinations of north Florida in 1882. All this work demanded so much from him that his now-grown son had completely taken over the pharmacy since Mohr's health had been overstrained by his exploration work. He was given an honorary doctoral degree by the University of Alabama in 1893 in recognition of his work. In 1900, he moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where he worked on the large Biltmore Herbarium while compiling his beloved "Economic Botany of Alabama", about weeds, medicinal-, poisonous- and commercial-plants. His death on July 17, 1901, brought an end to his life of exploration. Mohr wrote many articles and botanical works which appeared in the German-language Pharmaceutische Rundschau in New York.