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An early 20th-century paper chemist, he is best remembered for a 1916 U.S. Department of Agriculture bulletin exploring how hemp hurds could be used to make paper. His work sits at an interesting crossroads of agriculture, industry, and materials science.
Jason L. Merrill is a little-known technical writer and researcher whose surviving public record points mainly to his work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In Hemp Hurds as Paper-Making Material (1916), he is identified as a paper-plant chemist working in paper-plant investigations, and he wrote the section on manufacturing paper from hemp hurds.
Because readily available biographical information appears to be very limited, not much more can be confirmed with confidence about his life beyond that professional role. What does stand out is the practical focus of his work: he was studying industrial uses for agricultural byproducts at a time when government research often aimed to connect farming with new commercial materials.
Today, Merrill is most often noticed by modern readers through that hemp-paper bulletin, which has been preserved in public-domain and library collections. For anyone interested in the history of papermaking, hemp, or early federal agricultural research, his contribution offers a small but revealing window into the period.