In 1885 the US Department of Agriculture Commissioner hired Maine botanist Frank Lamson-Scribner as the first federal plant pathologist with the US Department of Agriculture. By the time he joined the faculty at UT in 1888, he had 73 professional publications to his credit and had a genus of grass (Scribneria) named for him. Lamson-Scribner introduced the laboratory method of teaching in botany, completed the acquisition of Gattinger’s herbarium for UT, and published the first US study of grasses ("The Grasses of Tennessee," a UT Experiment Station Bulletin that was the basis of one of UT’s gold-medal winning exhibits at the Paris Exposition of 1900). He also published the first American book on plant diseases, "Fungus Diseases of Grape and Other Plants and Their Treatment."

He identified a new disease of the Irish potato occurring on the Cumberland Plateau, determining that the cause was a previously undescribed roundworm or nematode. Five years after his death, the nematode was officially named Pratylenchus scribneri in his honor. In 1894 he left UT to head the new USDA Division of Agrostology, a position from which he retired in 1922.