Two years after statehood, the Kansas Legislature established three colleges including the Kansas State Normal School of Emporia.  The first catalog, in 1868, lists botany as one of three available natural history courses. The school burned to the ground in 1879.  A new building was completed in 1880 and Holmes Sadler was hired to teach natural history.  Botany, including laboratory, was a 20 week course vs. 10 weeks for zoology and geology.  Microscopy was required.  During the next 20 years Sadler was replaced by two successive naturalists, but the prominence of botany remained.  The second, Lyman Wooster, primarily a geologist, would hire one of his graduates, Elizabeth Crary, to be an instructor in the botany laboratories and eventually take over the lecture courses.  Frank Agrelius, a Ph.D.-trained botanist, was hired in 1911 and he and Crary, who did some graduate work at Chicago, expanded the botany offerings adding Anatomy, Physiology,  Taxonomy, and others.  This curriculum remained basically intact into the early 1950s.  In 1953 Biology 1 was introduced as a general education course and pre-requisite to botany, zoology and microbiology which were still required for all majors.  In 1946 Merle Brooks was hired as an instructor and kept on after Gilbert Leisman was hired to replace Agrelius in 1955.  Botany was growing, as was the department, with the baby boom anticipated, but also with the national concern for promoting STEM education.  Several biology faculty members, national leaders in biology education, tapped into growing external grant opportunities.  Between 1953 and 1968, the department received 4 major external grants, one from the National Wildlife Federation (6-yr) and three NSF (3-yr, 8-yr, 11-yr) totaling about $3 million.  The department grew from 13 to 23 members and from 3 to 6 (+1 mycologist) botanists, peaking in 1968.  In 1977 the universities name was changed to Emporia State University and the Biology Department was divided into 5 areas of concentration, including botany, but enrollments were already slowing so that by 1988 the department was down to 14 faculty with 3 botanists - comparable to 1950.   For the next 25 years, university enrollment continued to decline while the department numbers remained more or less constant. Since the 1950s there had been two unsuccessful attempts, by externally hired department chairs, to restructure and modify the core curriculum of the department.  Covid 19 ultimately drove change.  In 2021, under strong pressure from the administration, the core biology curriculum was changed to come in line with the other Regents universities.  Botany, zoology and introductory biology were dropped for a two-semester introductory sequence.  Additional university-wide restructuring terminated thirty-three, mostly tenured, faculty members as their programs were cut. The botany emphasis was one of two programs cut from the biology department, allowing two botany positions to be eliminated.  A single botanist remains to teach in the core organismal course and, in alternate semesters, Plant Taxonomy and Forensic Botany to serve the wildlife biology emphasis and Masters of Forensic Science program.