History of the Indiana Geological Survey

Figure 1. David Dale Owen, Geologist for the State of Indiana, 1837-39; State Geologist, 1859-60.

by John B. Patton

Note: This article contains excerpts from The Sesquicentennial of Geology in Indiana–1987 by John B. Patton in Indiana Geological Survey Special Report 44 - A Field Guide and Recollections: The David Dale Owen Years to the Present; A Sesquicentennial Commemoration of Service by the Geological Survey.

A Beginning

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An act approved by the Indiana legislature on February 6, 1837, began:

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Indiana, That the Governor be and is hereby authorized and required annually hereafter to appoint and commission a person of talents, integrity, and suitable scientific acquirements as Geologist for the State of Indiana, who shall receive in consideration of his faithful performance of his duties an annual salary not exceeding $1500.00 and necessary expenses not to exceed $250.00, to be paid as the salaries of other civil officers of the State.

Where to find a person of talents, integrity, and suitable scientific acquirements in any sparsely populated frontier state of that era might have proved to be a problem, but Indiana was the home of a person so well fitted for the role that we must wonder whether the position was not created to use his talents. The man was David Dale Owen (fig. 1), one of the sons of Robert Owen, who had purchased the town of New Harmony, on the Wabash River in Posey County, in 1824.

New Harmony was established in 1814 by a group of German extraction led by a man named George Rapp. They had moved from a colony named Harmonie in Pennsylvania, and numerous letters written by them from the new Indiana settlement were datelined Harmonie, Ind. It has been reported that Robert Owen changed the name to New Harmony when he acquired it, but a letter of 1815 from George Rapp to his son Frederick was datelined "Neu Harmony" and used the German spelling "Neu" and ended the word "Harmony" with a "y" instead of "ie" (Arndt, 1975, facing p.7). The Harmonists, during their 10 years, made no geologic contribution, but they built a physical base of operations in a wilderness, which their successors probably could not and surely would not have done. When Robert Owen, who was a successful industrialist and progressive thinker in New Lanark, Scotland, sought a site in America to test his ideas for social reform, the ready made community of New Harmony was for sale and was purchased.

Figure 2. William Maclure, eminent Scottish geologist and partner with Robert Owen in the New Harmony venture.

And how did it happen that David Dale Owen, as well as his brother Richard, became geologists? Surely we must attribute the circumstance in considerable part to the aforementioned William Maclure (fig. 2), a Scot who in 1825 became a partner with Robert Owen in the ownership of New Harmony.

Self-trained in geology, Maclure accumulated a fortune in business at an early age and was then able to devote years to his avocations, geology and applied public education, with such success that he has been referred to as the Father of American Geology and the William Smith of America. In fact, the first chapter of G. P. Merrill's "The First 100 Years of American Geology" (1924) is entitled "The Maclurian Era, 1785-1819."

Maclure's reputation was established before he came permanently to North America. His geologic investigations and publications in this country, including some of the first regional maps showing the eastern part of the continent, added to his luster, but this work preceded his investment in New Harmony. In fact, some of it preceded the establishment, under Father George Rapp, of the Harmonists' colony there. Maclure's maps of 1809, before New Harmony was established, and of 1818, after the Harmonist colony was founded, show surficial rocks in Indiana and Illinois Territory to be "Secondary," a name that would place them stratigraphically somewhere within Paleozoic and Mesozoic strata of modern terminology. He continued to publish, mostly on topics of global scale, through 1832, but his work did not emphasize the geology of midwestern North America, although the last two of his American papers were published in New Harmony.

It was Maclure, without doubt, who attracted other eminent geologists to New Harmony and gave the New Harmony cultural and scientific movement a geologic flavor that was unique in the New World. The most lasting impact that Maclure had on American geology may well have been the inspiration that he afforded to the then young David Dale Owen, a person of great talent but without specific direction of interest until after 1835, after Maclure's departure from New Harmony. Maclure himself, his immense collections, and the eminent scientists that he attracted to New Harmony must have been major factors in Owen's decision to become a geologist. For this purpose he entered medical school at Cincinnati and received the M.D. degree, apparently with no intent of becoming a practicing physician but because he regarded medical training as the best method of filling the gaps in his scientific knowledge. He had already some expertise in chemistry, and he thought it necessary to master physiology and anatomy to work with the fossils that were the key to deciphering the geologic record in the Midwest. In 1836, apparently between sessions of his medical training, Owen assisted Dr. Gerard Troost, then State Geologist of Tennessee, in a survey of that state. Troost, a Hollander, had spent a period in New Harmony during 1825 to 1827, when Maclure was there.

In the course of horseback traverses in 1837, Owen determined the stratigraphic succession of the bedrock (Owen, 1838, p. 11-19) and accurately placed the units in relation to the time scale that was evolving for systemic nomenclature in Great Britain. He correctly separated the systems that later became in America the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian, and he distinguished between the rocks that form the present Ordovician and Silurian Systems, even though the Ordovician System was not proposed by Lapworth until 1879. To accompany his report, Owen prepared in 1838 an outline map of the geology of Indiana that was never published but was deposited in the State Library, from which it must have been lost or taken shortly afterward. I am aware of no reference to it except Owen's own in which he described the map in sufficient detail to establish the fact that the boundaries shown must have been essentially the same as those shown on a map printed as part of an Owen paper published in England (1846). To tie the European and American continents together stratigraphically, carrying on precedents set by Maclure and Samuel George Morton, may not seem today to have been a notable accomplishment, but we are speaking of an era in which much of the stratigraphic work was done in a manner that did not offer any correlation of the rocks described with strata elsewhere. Stratigraphic units were most commonly named at the time by their lithologic characteristics, and Owen's were no exception, but their boundaries accorded with those of the classic British systems. His coal formation was the equivalent of the Upper Carboniferous of Great Britain, now the Pennsylvanian System in North America. The map correctly separated British Lower Carboniferous that became our present Mississippian System and the Devonian and Silurian Systems of the time. A boundary that encircled the crest of the Cincinnati Arch delineated the top of the then Lower Silurian that became the Ordovician System. In establishing the time relationship of these units with the classic British type sections, Owen extended traditional stratigraphic treatment into a region more than 6,000 miles from the home base and so furthered the concept of global chronostratigraphy.

The Fenton and Fenton volume "Giants of Geology" (1942, p.165) commented unfavorably on the tendency for geologists of that time to restrict their interests to the collection and identification of fossils, but they quoted from the first Owen report (1838, p.4) as follows:

I have considered it my duty, while surveying a country so new as ours, to remember, that a State just settling, is like a young man starting in life, whom it behooves to secure to himself a competency, before he indulges in unproductive fancies. I have considered it the most important object, to search out the hidden resources of the State, and open new fields of enterprise to her citizens. That object effected, time enough will remain to institute inquiries (which a liberal policy, forbids us to overlook) of a less productive and more abstract character; inquiries which are interesting in a scientific, rather than a commercial, point of view.

The Fentons continued (p.166), "a sane as well as practical rule, and one which made the man who framed it America's first great economic geologist."

Owen correctly predicted (1838, p. 26) that commercial coal would not be found beneath the uppermost of the limestones that are now classified as Mississippian in age. He called attention to both limestone and sandstone suitable for building stone, to clays and shales usable for ceramic ware, to natural cement rock, to iron ores that would suffice for the small-scale recovery operations of that day, to rock units that could be fashioned into whetstones and rotary grindstones, and to sand and gravel deposits. Owen did not actually discover all of these mineral resources, as most had already been noted and used, but he placed the materials into a geologic order that permitted a scientific approach to their location.

As to the prospect for discovery of certain other types of mineral deposits, Owen observed (1838, p.30):

"None of the precious metals will ever be found in Indiana, unless in minute portions in boulders..."

and (1838, p.30):

"It is not likely that anthracite coal will ever be found in Indiana..."

The Owen survey failed to mention only two of the resources that have contributed in any substantial measure to the mineral economy of the state during the ensuing 144 years: petroleum-and we should remember that his work preceded the drilling of the Drake well at Titusville, Pa., by more than 20 years-and gypsum, which does not appear at the surface and was not recognized as having economic potential until the 1950's.

Political support was strong for continuation of the Indiana survey, but the opposition was also strong. Not until 2 days before the end of the 1839 legislative session was a bill for continuation approved, and it was amended to cover only 1 year instead of the proposed 3 years. Although the bill passed in February 1839, the governor did not immediately appoint Owen for continued service, an action that has been attributed, inconclusively, to political rivalry between the then governor and David Dale Owen's brother Robert Dale. Whatever the cause, reappoin~ ment was not offered until June, and by then David Dale Owen was interested in, and was fairly assured of receiving, appointment as a geologist for the federal government. He declined the Indiana appointment. State-supported geologic investigations in Indiana virtually ceased for 20 years, except for employment from 1851 to 1853 of Ryland T. Brown as Geological Agent for the State Board of Agriculture and a single published geologic report (Brown, 1854) that resulted from the assignment.

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