Geological Surveys, State

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GEOLOGICAL SURVEYS, STATE

GEOLOGICAL SURVEYS, STATE. From 1824 until about 1860, state geological surveys contributed significantly to the development of the economic and intellectual life of the American states. Even at the time they were made, these surveys were regarded as part of the nationwide campaign for internal improvements, and they were closely related to the transportation revolution. The reports of geological surveys influenced the routes of roads, canals, and railroads by describing natural features that assisted or hampered construction and by indicating valuable mineral deposits to which transportation lines could be run in anticipation of profitable business. In turn, railways and canals created cross sections of rocks for geologists to study and provided easier access to all corners of the states. Construction engineers were often hired as state geologists (and vice versa), and there was an easy two-way flow of information about topography and geological formations between engineers and state scientists.

The movement for state geological surveys began in the South. North Carolina appointed Denison Olmsted, science professor at the state university, to prosecute a survey in 1824. Elisha Mitchell inherited the geologist's job along with the professorship in 1826 and finished the survey in 1828. The survey produced four short annual reports on economical geology, and the purely scientific findings appeared in 1842 in a geological textbook written by Mitchell. South Carolina had Lardner Vanuxem, professor at South Carolina College, examine the state's minerals and strata in 1825 and 1826. Tennessee (1831–1850), Maryland (1833–1842), Virginia (1835–1842), and all the other southern states established surveys more comprehensive than the two early models.

Massachusetts fielded the first survey of a northern state from 1830 to 1833. Edward Hitchcock, its geologist, persuaded the legislature to include botany and zoology, making the survey one of natural history rather than of geology only. Massachusetts combined its geological survey with a wider effort to map the state's topography accurately; inadequate maps plagued all the state geologists, who, in addition to their other responsibilities, often made geographical discoveries. Hitchcock presented results of practical interest in his preliminary report and also published, at state expense, a heavily illustrated, seven-hundred-page final report replete with scientific data and theories to explain the state's geological history.

New York and Pennsylvania organized and financed critically important surveys beginning in 1836. Pennsylvania appointed a chief geologist and a corps of assistants who examined the coalfields in minute detail and exhaustively studied the structure of the mountains of Appalachia. New York had eight administratively independent scientists—four field geologists, a botanist, a mineralogist, a zoologist, and a paleontologist—who met annually to coordinate results. The scientists published twelve large volumes on soils, salt brines, ores, building materials (especially those relevant for canal construction), water supplies, and nearly every other practical aspect of the state's landscape in their annual reports. As in the South, so in the North and Midwest: nearly every state had a geological survey done or in progress by the beginning of the Civil War.

The surveys of the Jacksonian period fit political ideas of that era. They were decentralized away from federal control, in keeping with the then-current notions of the Democratic Party, and they signaled governmental concern for economic development, a concept usually associated with the Whigs. Both parties approved of institutions that spread information of economic and intellectual value among the whole population; private surveys would have confined such knowledge to an elite wealthy enough to finance them. American surveys differed from those of European countries partly as a result of these political premises. In England and France, learned societies and universities performed many of the functions of American state surveys. England's underfinanced effort began late (1835) relative to American surveys, and France's first survey (1766–1780) was almost purely scientific.

The work of the Jacksonian surveys marks an important chapter in American intellectual history, for state surveys trained many scientists as assistants on the job who later had distinguished careers. The surveys led to the creation of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which grew from a meeting of the state geologists in 1840 to share field results, into the larger body by 1848. The surveys contributed also to the development of geological theory. The New York corps distinguished itself in paleontology and stratigraphy. Henry Darwin Rogers of the Pennsylvania survey (1836–1842) and his brother William Barton Rogers of the Virginia survey (1835–1842) advanced tectonics with their original and influential interpretation of the geological history of the Appalachian chain. European scientists read the reports of American state surveys and used the scientific information in them. Surveys were a significant source of employment for American scientists before the rise of universities, a focus for highlevel research of both practical and theoretical benefit, and a training school functionally analogous to a modern graduate school.

Financial hard times of the late 1830s and early 1840s led the states to cut down on surveys. Thereafter, surveys had a new interest: as soils of the Atlantic and coastal area showed signs of nutrient depletion, many surveys were oriented toward scientific agriculture. The Civil War slowed activity in state surveys, and after the war several factors contributed to the eclipse of state geological surveys by other organizations. Most of the postbellum surveys began in states that had already been reported on once, if only after reconnaissance, so the sense of adventure and pioneering was missing. The four great surveys of the American West (1867–1878) sponsored by the federal government, with all of their glamour and economic significance, drew attention away from state efforts. The U. S. Geological Survey, consolidated in 1879 from these earlier federal activities, took over many operations collectively done by states, particularly problems of mapping and water supply, and also more theoretical work. Colleges and universities also gradually absorbed many of the research functions of the state surveys. By the end of the nineteenth century, state surveys were directed toward two goals that occasionally conflicted: to assist entrepreneurs in exploiting mineral resources and to promote conservation. This tension still affects state bureaus of mines and geological surveys.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Corgan, James X., ed. The Geological Sciences in the Antebellum South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982.

Ferguson, Walter Keene. Geology and Politics in Frontier Texas, 1845–1909. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969.

Goetzmann, William H. Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West. New York: Knopf, 1966.

Meisel, Max. A Bibliography of American Natural History: The Pioneer Century, 1769–1865. Brooklyn, N. Y. : Premier Publishing, 1924–1929.

Merrill, George Perkins. Contributions to a History of American State Geological and Natural History Surveys. Washington, D. C. : U. S. Government Printing Office, 1920.

Socolow, Arthur A., ed. The State Geological Surveys: A History. Tallahassee, Fl. : Association of American State Geologists, 1988.

Michele L.Aldrich/a. r.