"The insanities of an exalted imagination": The troubled first geological survey of Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

Volumn 127, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 291-308

  Boscoe, Francis P ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33645812081     PISSN: 00314587     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (51)

1. The quotation is that of Peter A. Brown, corresponding secretary of the Geological Society of Pennsylvania. Journal of the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1833), 2:711-13 (hereafter cited as House Journal).
2. My approach is influenced by David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition (London, 1992), 1-4.
3. Also see David N. Livingstone, "Science and Religion: Foreword to the Historical Geography of an Encounter," Journal of Historical Geography 20 (1994): 367-83.
4. John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, 2001).
5. On borrowing by states, see John Joseph Wallis, "American Government Finance in the Long Run: 1790 to 1990," Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (2000): 61-82.
6. This line was used by both Peter A. Brown and Yale geologist Benjamin Silliman in their promotional efforts to obtain a survey for Pennsylvania. House Journal (1833), 2:711; (1834), 2:349. Silliman was also the editor of the American Journal of Science and the Arts.
7. The characteristic themes of the early geological surveys are set forth in several articles: Walter B. Hendrickson, "Nineteenth-Century State Geological Surveys: Early Government Support of Science," Isis 52 (1961): 357-71;
8. Leonard G. Wilson, "The Emergence of Geology as a Science in the United States," Journal of World History 10 (1967): 416-37;
9. and Steven P. Turner, "The Survey in Nineteenth-Century American Geology: The Evolution of a Form of Patronage," Minerva 25 (1987): 282-330.
10. See also Michael S. Smith, "The Conflict between 'Practical Utility' and Geology: Denison Olmstead, Elisha Mitchell and the 1823 to 1828 Geologic Surveys of North Carolina," Southeastern Geology 38 (1999): 145-54.
11. On the University of Pennsylvania, see Martin Meyerson and Dilys Pegler Winegrad, Gladly Learn and Gladly Teach: Franklin and His Heirs at the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1976 (Philadelphia, 1978).
12. Rogers came to Penn by way of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he had been fired for endorsing Pestalozzian educational philosophy, which favored science and applied learning over the study of the classics. Patsy Gerstner, Henry Darwin Rogers, 180S-1866: American Geologist (Tuscaloosa, Ala. , 1994), 18-19.
13. All towns listed in the proposal are included in the figure. House Journal (1833), 2:714-16.
14. See also Peter J. Lesley, Historical Sketch of Geological Explorations in Pennsylvania and Other States (Harrisburg, 1876), 36.
15. John Florin, The Advance of Frontier Settlement in Pennsylvania, 1638-1850: A Geographic Interpretation (University Park, Pa. , 1977).
16. The quotation appears in Gerstner, Henry Darwin Rogers, 61. Booth would eventually become the state geologist of Delaware. For comparable letters written by surveyor William EUicott some fifty years earlier, see William E. Russ Jr. , How Pennsylvania Acquired Its Present Boundaries (University Park, Pa. , 1966). In the first survey season, which Rogers described as a "preliminary reconnaissance," the crew was able to travel from West Chester to Erie and back in two weeks.
17. Henry D. Rogers, First Annual Report on the Geological Exploration of the State of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1837).
18. The brothers were very close and frequent collaborators. William later went on to found the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after Henry's death.
19. House Journal (1834), 2:348-52.
20. Gerstner, Henry Darwin Rogers, 29-34, 43.
21. Also Bruce Sinclair, Philadelphia's Philosopher Mechanics: A History of the Franklin Institute, 1824-1865 (Baltimore, 1974).
22. Robert Owen was the father of eventual Indiana state geologist David Dale Owen.
23. House Journal (1836), 1:520-24. Of course, while hiring a geologist may improve one's chances of success at locating mineral wealth, even the best geologist cannot find what does not exist, and most of these minerals would receive but one dismissive mention in the entire corpus of survey publications: in the first survey report, their absence in the state was attributed to "traditions, originating sometimes in ignorance, sometimes, probably, in fraud. " Rogers, First Annual Report, 11. Copper merited one half of a page in the over sixteen-hundred-page final report, a description of a modest nickel and copper mine in Gap, Lancaster County, that employed ten workers.
24. Henry D. Rogers, The Geology of Pennsylvania: A Government Survey (Philadelphia, 1858), 2:1022.
25. Carter Goodrich, "The Revulsion against Internal Improvements," Journal of Economic History 10 (1950): 145-69.
26. On the voting patterns of the representatives from German counties, see Francis P. Boscoe, "A Project of Doubtful Utility: Measuring Legislative Opposition to the Pennsylvania Canal," Political Geography 19 (2000): 997-1011.
27. These events are detailed in Reginald C. McGrane, Foreign Bondholders and American State Debts (New York, 1935).
28. On the greater "Bank War" between Biddle and Jackson, see George Rogers Taylor, ed. , Jackson versus Biddle: The Struggle over the Second Bank of the United States (Boston, 1949)
29. and Peter L. Rousseau, "Jacksonian Monetary Policy, Specie Flows, and the Panic of 1837," Journal of Economic History 62 (2002): 457-88.
30. Suzanne Zeller, Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation (Toronto, 1987), 4-5.
31. Henry D. Rogers, Second Annual Report on the Geological Exploration of the State of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1838).
32. Kenneth L. Taylor, "The Historical Rehabilitation of Theories of the Earth," Compass of Sigma Gamma Epsilon 69 (1992): 334-45.
33. Also Zeller, Inventing Canada, 43.
34. Henry Darwin Rogers and William Barton Rogers, "On the physical structure of the Appalachian Chain, as exemplifying the laws which have regulated the elevation of great mountain chains generally," Transactions of the American Association of Geologists and Naturalists 1 (1843): 475-531. The AAGN was an organization formed in 1840 out of the defunct Geological Society of Pennsylvania.
35. and Kevin T. Dann, Traces on the Appalachians: A Natural History of Serpentine in Eastern North America (New Brunswick, N. J. , 1988).
36. House Journal (1841), 2:12.
37. See, for example, Philip Shriver Klein and Ari Hoogenboom, A History of Pennsylvania (University Park, Pa. , 1980).
38. For Northampton County, see Peter Fritts, History of Northampton County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1877).
39. House Journal (1841), 1:21, 281, 327, 358.
40. Laws of the Pennsylvania General Assembly (Harrisburg, 1844), 7.
41. W. B. Rogers Jr. , A Few Facts Regarding the Geological Survey of Pennsylvania, Exposing the Erroneous Statements and Claims of J. P. Lesley, Secretary of the American Iron Association (Philadelphia, 1859).
42. Rogers's principle creditor was Roswell Colt, one of the former directors of the Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania. Rogers eventually managed to pay the balance in full, something Colt could not claim with respect to his own creditors. Gerstner, Henry Darwin Rogers, 132-34.
43. Mary C. Rabbitt, Minerals, Lands, and Geology for the Common Defence and General Welfare: A History of Public Lands, Federal Science and Mapping Policy, and Development of Mineral Resources in the United States, vol. 1, Before 1879 (Washington D. C. , 1979); Hendrickson, "Nineteenth-Century State Geological Surveys. "
44. House Journal (1851), 2:131.
45. Samuel Harries Daddow and Benjamin Bannan, Coal, Iron, and Oil; or, the Practical American Miner (Pottsville, Pa. , 1866).
46. Gerstner, Henry Darwin Rogers, 192-94.
47. Rogers, Geology of Pennsylvania, 1: vii.
48. Daddow and Bannan, Coal, Iron, and Oil. For other reviews, see, for example, American Journal of Science 28 (1859): 149-51
49. and Saturday Renew of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art (30 Apr. 1859): 530-31.
50. In contrast, an optimistic assessment of the final report is offered by Anne Millbrooke, "Henry Darwin Rogers and the First State Geological Survey of Pennsylvania," Northeastern Geology 3 (1981): 71-74.
51. Lesley, Historical Sketch, 111.