Dr. Allen Mackenzie ’51 is always on the lookout for insects wherever he goes. It’s been a passion of his since he was a boy playing along Lawson’s Fork Creek in Spartanburg and it intensified while he was a student at Wofford College.
“He credits a professor at Wofford, who taught a summer biology entomology class, for the start of his bug collection,” says Sarah Donnan, one of Mackenzie’s four children.
That bug collection was recently donated to Wofford’s biology department. It includes beetles, hornets, dragonflies and many other insects that he collected around the globe.
Donnan contacted Dr. John Moeller, professor of biology and the department’s chair, before the COVID-19 pandemic to gauge the college’s interest in accepting Mackenzie’s collection. The conversations and plans to visit Mackenzie’s home in Roebuck, South Carolina, stalled during the pandemic, but resumed in the summer of 2022.
“I was blown away,” Moeller says. “They were wonderful, invited me into their home and showed me the collection and gave me a short history of Allen and his background and interests. I quickly started imagining ways to bring this into the classroom and research.”
Moeller was taken to Mackenzie’s basement, where five cabinets were filled with 60 trays of insects that Mackenzie collected over the years. There also were boxes of books and insects that hadn’t been mounted yet.
The collection was brought to a Wofford biology lab, where faculty and students quickly started exploring it. Moeller will go on sabbatical during the 2024-25 academic year, and he will spend time cataloging the collection. Biology faculty also will discuss ways to incorporate it into classes and research.
“It’s a great collection to compare diversity of organisms,” Moeller says.
Mackenzie’s horned beetles quickly jumped out to Moeller.
“I talk about them in class quite a bit,” Moeller says.
Beetles were one of Mackenzie’s favorite insects to study.
“He loved the tiny, tiny beetles and studied the microscopic ones that eat tiny holes in cabbage,” Donnan says.
Catching, mounting and identifying insects is a meticulous process.
“First, you prepare the animals and condition them to last,” Moeller says. “You must prep the insects to survive over time and you want to display them and have some understanding of how to minimize the needle going into the body. Lots of experience is needed, and then the time-consuming part is identifying which organism it is down to the species level.”
Moeller says Mackenzie’s donation gives the department a second prized collection. The other is a collection of plants by Professor Emeritus Dr. Doug Raynor.
Mackenzie also donated books and made a financial donation to support the maintenance of the collection and how it will be displayed.
After Wofford, Mackenzie graduated in the top 10% of his Tulane University School of Medicine class. He served in the U.S. Navy for two years as a physician before practicing rheumatology at the Cleveland Clinic.
Collecting insects became his hobby while living in Ohio, and he naturally developed a fascination with the joints of insect legs.
“He never went anywhere without a collecting bottle in his pocket in case he saw a new bug for his collection,” Donnan says.
Mackenzie retired to Spartanburg in the early 1990s.
“Once he retired, he’d spend fall, winter and spring collecting insects, and in the heat of the summer, he’d be in the cool basement pinning them up.”
The collection includes insects that he found while lecturing or vacationing in Costa Rica, Hawaii, Australia, Japan, Western Europe and along the Amazon River. A 1993 Wofford alumni publication announced him being named “Distinguished Rheumatologist” by the American College of Rheumatology, and he listed his hobby as traveling to rainforests with his late wife, Clara, while adding to his insect collection.
“When he updated his will 20 years ago, he started talking about making sure Wofford got his collection,” Donnan says. “We were glad to make it happen for him.”