Charles Fay Wheeler was born on June 14, 1842, in Mexico, N.Y., and was educated at the academy in that town. After enlisting in the Civil War and being discharged for a disability, he spent some time exploring nature and studying plants. For one year, 1866-1867, he studied medicine at the University of Michigan. He settled in Hubbardston, Michigan, setting up a drug and book store, and married Katharine T. Holbrook on March 4, 1869. Wheeler continued to study botany in his spare time and eventually accumulated some 7000 herbarium specimens. In 1881, he and Erwin Frink Smith coauthored a Catalogue of the phaenogamous and vascular cryptogamous plants of Michigan; indigenous, naturalized and adventive. Wheeler was appointed an instructor at the Michigan Agricultural College in 1889 after he had kept store for 22 years. He received a B.S. from the College in 1891 and published a Michigan Flora with W.J. Beal in 1892. Wheeler remained at the Michigan Agricultural College until 1902, serving as an assistant professor and consulting botanist to the Experiment Station and continuing to contribute to publications on the Michigan flora. In 1902 he left for Washington, D.C. to become the expert in charge of Economic Gardens at the Bureau of Plant Industry of the U.S.D.A. Wheeler died in Washington on March 5, 1910.