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surveying nature: environmental dimensions of VIRGINIA'S
BENJAMIN R. COHEN
FIRST SCIENTIFIC SURVEY, 1835–1842
ABSTRACT
State scientific surveys are underexplored territory in environmental history, an oversight made more glaring since these projects were rich in their assumptions, methods, and legacies. This article examines Virginia's 1830s Geological Survey, asking why the state sought its benefits, how the project was organized, and what specific social and technical activities it comprised. The survey, all told, is indicative of a budding interest in and acceptance of science as a valid means to describe the environment.
"Whilst engaged in the improvement of the State... the great wealth which lies buried in the earth... only requires examination of men of science to bring before the country, and make known its value."
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| Governor John Floyd, 1833 |
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"On the subject of a geological and chemical survey [Virginia] would behold, spread out beneath her soil, the rich earths, which [are] soon to diffuse fertility over the hills and plains."
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| William Barton Rogers,18341 |
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| IN 1837, HEZEKIAH DAGGS, a farmer from the fertile Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, sent a letter to Virginia's foremost natural philosopher, William Barton Rogers. "I take the earliest opportunity of sending you five bottles of Sulphur Water and a specimen of lime stone," he wrote, adding that he also was including "a specimen of what I suppose to be shale." Daggs and Rogers did not know each other; their correspondence might not be expected. But the farmer was interested in increasing agricultural yield, locating coal, and profiting from the possible medicinal benefits of his mineral springs. He had heard that Rogers was involved in a state-funded project to do just those things. That is, Daggs wanted to improve his property with the aid of Rogers's "specimen" analysis, to make his land more productive through the use of science.2 |
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At the time, Rogers was not only a professor of natural philosophy and chemistry at the young University of Virginia but also the official in charge of Virginia's first Geological Survey. As the most prominent geologist and chemist in the state, he had been fielding requests from all over the Old Dominion to analyze water, soil, and mineral samples for several years. By 1835, before the survey even began, his notebook on the "Analyses of Marl, Sand, and Soils" reached forty-three pages.3 When Daggs wrote, Rogers was preparing for his second full season of the survey. He sat at his home in Charlottesville coordinating assignments to paid assistants, reporting to superiors at the Board of Public Works in Richmond, and lining up unpaid contributors from around the state—farmers like Daggs—to assist in the collection of samples, or "specimens." |
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Virginia's Geological Survey was funded from 1835 to 1842. It was the state's first self-described scientific survey, seeking as it did to systematically identify the vast store of inanimate natural resources within its boundaries. Thomas Jefferson had compiled a state survey of sorts in the 1780s with his Notes on the State of Virginia, wherein he assessed the status of his state's natural features in categories such as rivers, mountains, and "productions mineral, vegetable and animal." But his project did not have legislative backing, stemming instead from an era of high-Enlightenment civic pursuits into the knowledge of nature; nor was it pursued with the coordination of hired gentlemen of science. The first scientific survey was also not the last, as early twentieth-century Virginia followed the success of later nineteenth-century federal surveys by authorizing a permanent governmental institution in 1908 called the Geological Survey.4 |
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