Benjamin R. Cohen

surveying nature: environmental dimensions of VIRGINIA'S

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."

Governor John Floyd, 1833

"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."

William Barton Rogers,1834¹

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

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."

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

Belying the narrow "Geological" title, the 1830s survey was notable for its agricultural emphasis. The 1835 legislators complemented their interest in mineral wealth and coal interests by addressing questions of agricultural improvement and soil identity. This was no small overture, since eight out of ten Virginians were working on farms in 1840—or, as in many cases, overseeing slaves who performed that labor. Wheat, corn, oats, and potatoes grew all over the Commonwealth in addition to the more famed tobacco grown in only a fourth of the state's counties. Offering a more systematic scientific study of that land, the legislators believed, would provide a new method for identifying and assessing Virginia's cultivated and cultivatable lands. They wrote that, with "a view to the geological features of our territory, and the chemical composition of its soils, minerals, and mineral waters," Virginia could generate a more productive agronomy and provide a more accurate assessment of mineral availability. The state officials foresaw these benefits accruing through the process of scientific surveying. From the start, the Geological Survey melded the practical economic interests envisioned by the legislature with the more strictly scientific interests of Rogers, its chief organizer.⁵

State scientific surveys are underexplored territory in environmental history, an oversight made more glaring since these were projects rich in their assumptions, methods, and legacies. As complex undertakings aimed at identifying, defining, and improving natural resources, the surveys stood at the beginning of a modern era soon committed to the use of scientific and technical means for gaining environmental knowledge. They offer environmental historians an opportunity to examine how new means for studying nature were being created. With their less-discussed agricultural dimensions, surveys also offer a view of a developing agro-science that relied on assumptions of a materialist and codifiable concept of soil. Using chemistry and geology to reveal "the great wealth which lies buried in the earth," as Governor John Floyd suggested, or to "diffuse fertility over the hills and plains," as William Rogers put it, had not theretofore been an obvious approach. The survey helps show how such a method was considered in fact plausible and valuable.⁶ In its antebellum context, the project offered various state actors, from farmer Hezekiah Daggs to Governor Floyd, what they were looking for: a new way to identify and define the value of the earth under their feet.⁷

To be sure, geologically scientific surveys have received a good deal of scholarly attention, but mostly in their federal form, as part of the story of western expansion, or without significant attention to their agricultural aspects.⁸ Donald Worster, for instance, notes that "the survey demands scientific expertise; it is a project characteristic of a modern nation-state steeped in the perspective of science." In his case, Worster is referring to postbellum federal surveys with terms just as applicable to their antebellum forerunners, before the "modern nation-state" was fully developed.⁹ Surveys in general—including cartographical, agricultural, and natural-historical—also have been studied, but more for what they represent than for how they were produced. David Nye, in one case, highlights the introduction of values of rationality and logic into land practices with the examples of cartographic surveys; Steven Stoll argues in part that agricultural surveys were evidence of a proto-conservationist ethic to restore depleted soil for the sake of dissuading emigration from the east; and Carolyn Merchant, by reference to improvement societies that organized local surveys, elaborates the view that older animistic philosophies of nature were being supplanted by newer mechanistic and scientific theories by the mid-nineteenth century.¹⁰ Yet the environmental relevance of the antebellum scientific survey itself—its basic purpose, organization, and methods—has received little attention. Not only do those state surveys show how the "scientific expertise" clearly identifiable later in the century had relevant smaller-scale, albeit indirect, antecedents, but they also reveal just how nature was becoming viewed with that "perspective of science." They offer us a view of the means for producing scientific knowledge of nature.

This article examines the place of Virginia's survey in the American era of internal improvements, the logistics with which the project was organized, and the mechanisms with which it was produced. It asks, that is, why the state sought the benefits of a survey, how officials organized it, and what specific social and technical activities defined its operations. Even though the Old Dominion's efforts were part of a broader historical era of public projects aiming to identify, manipulate, and control nature's resources, backers also brought their own justifications when arguing for a survey—maintaining a slave economy, preserving the cultural heritage of Old Virginia, and recovering from the losses of exhausted soil high among them—and sought particular goals for it. Their example thus offers a case set in a particular time and place, yet one suggestive of larger patterns in seeking new ways to study and define soils, waters, and minerals.¹¹

With its agro-economic dimensions, the role of Virginia's scientific survey as an agent of internal improvement offered its citizens a new, complementary way to know the environment.¹² The survey offers historians several clear messages: one, that by the 1830s, Virginians believed the scientific evaluation of resources was a valuable undertaking; two, that Rogers and his staff provided the view resulting from such a project through an always arduous, sometimes tenuous coordination of field-based examinations and lab-based processes; and three, that the project indicated an openness to new ideas and a budding interest in and acceptance of science as a valid means to describe the environment. Virginia's survey, a product of the antebellum improvement ethos, helps place early scientific evaluations of nature into a richer historical context.

IMPROVEMENT AND THE STATE SURVEY

VIRGINIA'S GENERAL EFFORTS toward improvement were developed as part of a prevailing ethos of progress in the early Republic. The state's goals were twofold, aiming to better an agricultural economy by making its lands more productive and to halt a perceived decline in population and cultural strength. State leaders sought a survey to achieve those goals. In this, their purpose was at once common to the age and uniquely conceptualized.

On the one hand, Virginia was caught up in a context of scientific and technological development much larger than itself. The era of internal improvements—roughly the late 1810s to the 1840s—was defined in the main by large public projects aimed at re-evaluating, redefining, and in some form controlling the features on or under the earth. Canals, railroads, and turnpikes were the more popular of those projects and the ones more obviously seeking to control the natural environment, but scientific surveys were just as notable if not more subtle in their goals of redefining and controlling nature.¹³ The earliest examples of scientific organization were also appearing, as universities appointed not just natural philosophers, but chemists, geologists, and botanists, and organizations like the American Association of Geologists, the Franklin Institute, and the United States Coastal Survey brought together what later would be called professional scientists.¹⁴

When Virginians voted to fund their survey in 1835, they were the fifth state to do so, following North Carolina, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Maryland.¹⁵ Within a few years, New Jersey, Connecticut, Indiana, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania followed suit. Even though the era's milieu of weak federal power led each state to develop surveying endeavors locally, the states all had the common goals of cataloging and cultivating all manner of nature's resources.¹⁶ What is more, although the dynamics of industrialization, political economy, and social mores eventually distinguished the various states of the union, in the early Republic they still operated in a shared context of agricultural dominance.

The basic assumptions of scientific surveying were also common among the states. These included the idea that nature was a resource, a set of products that could be identified, mined, and sold.¹⁷ They also included the belief that economic benefits would come from the organized focus of scientists, those working to create "a unified, clear picture of Nature," in the words of historian Michele Aldrich. In the 1830s, New York's Governor William Marcy combined the two assumptions to argue that a Natural History survey, along with the already completed and successful Erie Canal, would open up new extractable resources from the West, thereby strengthening his state's economy. In Pennsylvania, the geologist Peter Browne similarly pitched the idea of a survey because agriculture would be "greatly enriched" by it. When Virginia's Governor Floyd explained to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1833 that a survey would find "the great wealth which lies buried in the earth," he was offering the typical view on nature's resourcefulness, not advancing a revolutionary idea.¹⁸

On the other hand, Virginia was motivated by a unique set of political and cultural concerns. Those conditions derived in part from the distinct historical status Virginia had long claimed. Territorially, the state was still the largest member of the Union, even after ceding present-day Kentucky following the Revolution. Demographically, it remained the most populous for the first several decades of the early Republic. As for political clout, the state was unmatched: For the first quarter of the century, the entire nation's political direction had been guided by the Virginian Dynasty of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Culturally, it promoted the image of the Old Virginian, a country gentleman riding across his plantations of slaves, upholding the centuries-old principles of virtue and pride. Of course, that slave-based agricultural economy at the same time highlighted the most glaring difference between Virginia and its neighbors to the north. Questions about maintaining a distinct Virginian culture were thus also questions about supporting slavery. By the end of the Virginia Dynasty in the 1820s, though, the Old Dominion was on a downward trend from its former status as the largest, most populous, and wealthiest state.

Several interrelated factors contributed to this decline, including the well-told story of soil exhaustion, a sense of increased competition from other states, and a general population shift to the west.¹⁹ To attack these interrelated cultural and economic problems, Virginians sharpened their focus on agro-economic foundations in several ways. As a broad political example, the House of Delegates established a Board of Public Works in 1816 as a way, they said, to reverse the "familiar scenes of poverty and decline."²⁰ In more local forums, citizens formed improvement societies that organized agricultural surveys, usually at the county level, and fostered systematic studies of soil quality and fertilization. The Agricultural Society of Albemarle and the Fredericksburg Agricultural Society were both founded in 1817. The Agriculture Society of Virginia, with its deceptively statewide title—its members were predominantly Richmond-based—organized soon after, in 1818. The rural press first made its mark as a source of agricultural information in the 1820s—not just in Virginia, of course, but up and down the Atlantic Coast. Those papers often reprinted the minutes of improvement societies and promoted an ethos of agricultural advance in their editorials and commentaries.²¹ Nonetheless, judging by perceptions a decade later, these endeavors were insufficient. At Virginia's 1830 constitutional convention, Benjamin Watkins Leigh, later Virginia's Whig senator in the United States Congress, noted a still-persistent "tripartite decline" in his state: "a loss of 'Genius,' a loss of wealth, and a loss in population." James Garnett, one of Virginia's staunchest improvement advocates and the president of the Fredericksburg Agricultural Society, probably captured the sentiment best when he lamented in 1827 that "poor Virginia furnishes a spectacle at present... her Agriculture nearly gone to ruin from a course of policy which could not well have been worse destructive if destruction had been its sole objective."²²

Virginians thus argued for a survey much like their neighbor states to the north, though to promote a congeries of local factors unique in force and scope: for the sake of a robust cultural heritage, in response to waning political power, against fears of emigration, and to improve and expand beyond an agricultural environment with more systematic attention to "soils, minerals, and mineral waters." The project was, in other words, about "improving" the environment and culture by redefining it with geological and chemical approaches. Nearly a half century after Jefferson's Notes, two decades after the establishment of the Board of Public Works, a decade after the initial rise of the rural press, with the examples of nearby states standing clearly before them, and with the firm belief that a clearer look at nature's resources would improve their situation, Virginians voted in 1835 to fund an official, systematically organized scientific survey.

The General Assembly's 1835 vote brought together direct economic interests with growing scientific, and more theoretical, sophistication. Passing with relative ease, the survey bill was apparently an effective political article, including enough to appease disparate constituencies—agriculturalists, coal-mining advocates, canal beneficiaries, and grain and tobacco market agents from east to west—without presenting too many measures of strictly local benefit. In one instance, for example, Robert Mills, an engineer, land-holder, architect, and mineral prospector from northwestern Virginia, asked the state for an advanced copy of the survey's report, expecting to find a variety of suitable offerings for his wide range of interests.²³ The most pressing task at that point was to identify a surveyor capable of navigating that range.

THE DYNAMICS OF VIRGINIA'S TERRITORY

AS DICTATED BY the legislature, the first year's work would be a reconnaissance providing "a view to the geological features of our territory, and the chemical composition of its soils, minerals, and mineral waters." To perform that reconnaissance and to define the parameters of the following year's surveys, the General Assembly selected its official surveyor, the one charged with organizing project logistics. With the appointment of William Barton Rogers to that post, Virginians added another unique facet to their project since their survey became a near Rogers-family affair. It was through Rogers's organization that "specimens" of Virginia's countryside would become samples of quantifiable identity.

Admittedly, Rogers was the logical choice for the position. He was the state's foremost natural philosopher and the most successful sibling of an unusually active family of chemists and geologists.²⁴ In 1834, at the request of several counties in the northern Shenandoah Valley, he had coauthored a "Report from the Select Committee of the General Assembly of Virginia... Praying for a Geological Survey of the State" put before the Richmond politicians. More directly still, in February 1835 he was the key advocate of the survey, speaking directly to the General Assembly at its legislative session. After his speech, William wrote to his brother Henry that he "was listened to with a riveted and deep attention," as the delegates "passed high encomiums on my address."²⁵ Then a professor of Natural Philosophy at the College of William and Mary, he had moved to the relatively new University of Virginia (chartered in 1819) by the time the survey began in earnest in the spring of 1836. He remained there until leaving for Boston in the 1850s to work on founding MIT.

As a professor, Rogers had the chemical knowledge to analyze the samples he collected. His geological experience was tied to this chemical familiarity; since the two sciences were so interwoven at the time, credibility in one field meant credibility in the other. Governor Littleton Tazewell, prefacing Rogers's first-year reconnaissance report to the House of Delegates, made that point to his audience, writing that it was Rogers's "reputation as a geologist and chemist [that] induced the board without hesitation to appoint him to make said reconnaissance."²⁶ Yet the professor was no farmer and made no claims of direct acquaintance with the daily travails of soil management, an issue that might have concerned delegates less enthusiastic about the survey than Tazewell. Thus, although his ability to analyze soil samples was at least partially legitimized by his professional academic standing, more influential still would have been his reputation in the farming community. On this count, it helped that Rogers's work was being published in Edmund Ruffin's The Farmer's Register, a paper reaching 1,400 households by that time. By 1834, Rogers was contributing original material to Ruffin's paper, in one case explaining how farmers too could analyze the quality of their local marl—crushed shell deposits useful as "calcareous manure" fertilizers—with his "easy and convenient" apparatus. Such familiarity among the agrarian class helped give him a degree of cultural credibility; he earned a reputation among farmers as someone interested in practical pursuits and vouched for by a rural press editor.²⁷ With Rogers's appointment, then, the project gained currency not just from the economic and political quarters that funded it, but from educational, agricultural, and scholarly ones too, since Rogers had patrons in academic, rural political, and scientific circles.²⁸

Rogers quickly got to work defining the survey plan to accomplish his own geological aims while satisfying those patrons. Temporally, the survey season was planned to run from mid-spring to mid-fall, allowing for long days and the time outside of the school year to coordinate and manage the process. Spatially, the project hit nearly all corners of the state at some point in its nearly seven-year duration. Differing land uses uniquely defined the different regions, so that the demands on Rogers's plans—more emphasis on agriculture or minerals, for example—depended on the region of the state he was in. In all, Rogers's plan was to combine as best as possible the breadth of observations across the state with depth of environmental analysis at each locale.

During the six years after the reconnaissance year of 1835, Rogers focused on these different areas of the state, as evident in the concentration and development of each year's reports. The first year emphasized the eastern tidewater and the peninsular marl regions and coal deposits near Richmond, ending with a brief glance toward southwest counties down the Shenandoah Valley. The second year was spent finishing up the eastern observations, and then stressing "all of the region lying between the Blue Ridge and the first escarpment of coal-bearing rocks of the Alleghany proper." The third year, 1838, bore down on the same western arena as the previous year, with greater detail and a larger set of samples. The fourth year saw additional attention to the wide piedmont between the Blue Ridge and the counties near the capital of Richmond, while the fifth and sixth years related "chiefly to the marl region between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers, the northern district east of the Blue Ridge, and the great western coal region."²⁹

Rogers hired as many as five assistants at a time to cover such a wide expanse. His younger brother, Henry, was the first assistant on board, helping out during the initial reconnaissance year of 1835. (Thereafter, Henry would be too pre-occupied running the Pennsylvania and New Jersey surveys.) The rest of the team dispersed to study the geological features of the Appalachians, the fertile agricultural Valley of Virginia (the Shenandoah), the coal regions, the marl and clay regions of the eastern peninsulas, the mineral springs of the valley, and the various features of the piedmont. The survey indeed seemed like a Rogers family affair. Henry helped that first year; Robert, their youngest brother and a noted chemist, helped out on field trips and with analytical laboratory support; and James Rogers, the eldest brother and also a trained chemist, assisted on and off—paid and unpaid—over the entire span of the survey. William Aikin, George Boyd, Caleb Briggs, Charles Hayden, Thomas Ridgeway, and Israel Slade rounded out the cast. Their prior experiences ranged from the freshly trained Briggs, having just completed his studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, to the veteran, William Aikin, a former worker on various New York surveys.³⁰

For 1836, Rogers was allotted $3,000 to fund himself and just one assistant, thereby doubling the amount authorized for the 1835 reconnaissance. As might be expected, money was always an issue, and the tense letters between Rogers and his contact at the Board of Public Works, James Brown, Jr., speak clearly to this. Rogers did receive a modest increase in funding in 1837, but never anything to match the grand designs of some other states—New York, in particular, estimated costs for its ambitious Natural History Survey at $109,000 with a staff of seventeen paid scientists. By the end of the project, Rogers had spent $40,000 in just under seven years. Since the state authorized a total of only $26,500, Rogers's personal investments were significant.³¹

The "annual reports" written by Rogers from information provided by his assistants and from his own field travels was a key end result of the survey for the state's General Assembly.³² Those annual reports provided the means by which his direct observations, filtered analyses of samples, and collated assessments of rock, water, and soil quality made their way to the Virginia legislature and ultimately the general public. The reports represented the public face of the survey. Along with the mineral cabinet that Rogers amassed, it provided visible proof that the assembly's money was well spent. Likewise, the report could become an artifact whose value resided in its ability to make the distinct, real, stable, and beneficial information inside transportable . They were thus rhetorical representations of the nature of Virginia, expressed in the idiom of scientific analysis.

As exemplified by these published reports, the process of surveying the state was a process of translating various natural features from sites individually experienced and uniquely conceptualized into a series of "specimens," each identifiable in a technically codified, universalized way.³³ The bare fact of a report, though, obscured the work involved in producing its results. As it were, the mechanisms created and deployed to measure Virginia's countryside were more tenuous and less straightforward than the reports' rhetorical clarity would suggest. Those practices, deployed by survey agents across the state, came to signify the new means by which the state sought to define nature through scientific interaction.

THE LOGISTICS AND LABOR OF SURVEYING

FROM THE START, the survey team was charged with organizing and deploying a scientific and technological apparatus for measuring, assessing, and defining the inanimate natural features—soils, minerals, and mineral waters—of the state. But it was not easy to coordinate the survey's everyday logistics; such features had to be created and then produced over the years of the project.³⁴ To do this, Rogers produced a system of analysis through dimensions both social and technical. All told, those features, explored next in parallel, speak to the devil-filled details required to produce a project that could define and improve nature. They simultaneously point to nature's resistance to codification, that the land itself was an active agent pushing against the work of the surveyors.

CORRESPONDENCE, OBSERVATION, AND REPORT

ROGERS AND HIS survey personnel had the burden of creating a space—the survey—where disorganized, uncollated measurements across the landscape could be fashioned into codified, polished data. The establishment of a cohesive social organization was a central component of such a space. In this regard, Rogers immediately had a series of organizational wrinkles to iron out from his home base in Charlottesville.³⁵ They included establishing effective correspondence networks with assistants, developing a reliable network of sample collectors, and accomplishing the rhetorical feat of producing a report to suit the needs of the state.

The development of a system of written correspondence was hampered by an unreliable transportation infrastructure and inconsistent postal service.³⁶ The record of letters from the survey shows that the assistants experienced a consistent and irritating pattern of communication. Letters arrived late, or not at all; goods were damaged in the mail; instructions were unclear to those gentlemen in the field. In fact, the record of one assistant in particular, Charles Hayden, is nearly comical in its consistent appeal for more mail. Barely a letter went by without him making note of a package not received or instructions late in arriving. Several letters sent were predicated entirely on wondering whether a previous letter had been received. The other assistants—Briggs, Slade, Boyd, Aikin, and even William's brother James—made similar complaints over the years, never failing to devote a part of almost every letter to the very matter of the letters and to the problems they encountered because of miscommunication.³⁷

On the face of it, this might simply appear as a problem of reliable transportation. While to some extent this must be true, it was also a problem of connecting the safe haven of the tamed city, Charlottesville, with its university and laboratory, to the more rustic country, where horses and letters and packages had to contend with inclement weather and mountains and thick brush across trails.³⁸ Communications, that is, had to contend with an environment quite vast—nearly five hundred miles from east to west—and not yet controlled enough to make such correspondence easy.

What is more, while awaiting those instructions, the assistants, Hayden high among them, complained of numerous field difficulties—such as heat and insects—and their part in preventing work. Israel Slade had similar experiences and obstacles, lamenting his lame horse and lost trunk. William Aikin could not pass certain roads because of mud and exhausted horses. James Rogers experienced bad weather, poor health, a lame horse, and damaged equipment all at once. William Rogers only occasionally addressed these problems in his annual reports, talking about "the fatigue and privation" to which the assistants "were frequently exposed."³⁹ To be sure, the fatigue, privation, and roadless miseries are classic problems of field scientists. But part of establishing a viable survey system was being able to acquire information from the field and incorporate it into a presentable report at the home base, a process meant to minimize the travails of the assistants that accompanied data acquisition.⁴⁰

A second organizational wrinkle for Rogers was the matter of identifying reliable rock, soil, and water sample providers and then using them as partners in the survey enterprise. The annual survey reports list pages of tables of analytical results for samples of marl, soil, rocks, and water from the Tidewater of the east to the mountains of the west. Where did these samples come from?

In part, the official survey was leveraging a system of sample acquisition that already existed throughout the Commonwealth. Well before the survey began, and in part because of the activity of county improvement societies, Rogers was receiving and analyzing samples from local farmers. In 1834, he wrote to his brother Henry that "[l]etters are coming to me every mail asking advice on the subject of marl or some other thing."⁴¹ He would later write in the annual report for 1837 that "[t]he high value of these researches, manifested by the eagerness with which the chemical details in the annual reports are referred to practical objects, is still more strikingly indicated by the numerous enquiries addressed to me, and the numerous specimens transmitted for examination from various quarters of the state."⁴² As well, some contributors were brought to the survey by contact with the traveling field assistants once the project was underway. Many others learned of it in the rural and urban presses. The papers often broadcast news of surveys, publishing comments and editorials about the project's progress and its associated legislation. Rogers proudly told his brother Henry that the "daily papers of Richmond have lauded my efforts in a very complimentary style." Other contributors knew of the survey by their relationship with Rogers, the university, or the state government directly. Joseph Cabell, as one example, was a prominent state senator, a Lancaster County planter, and a contributor to the project of marl sample. He knew of the survey because he was both a personal friend of William Rogers and an associate of the university.⁴³ Finally, many of those samples were taken directly by Rogers and the survey assistants. The process of locating contributors was less difficult than that of establishing a system of correspondence.

Rogers's rhetorical accomplishment following the receipt of field data was a third facet of organizational wrangling. The legally mandated reports to the Board of Public Works provide but a gloss on the field workers' training, assignments, and results. This gloss enabled field results to appear nearly problem-free when presented in the report—such as the isolated mention of "fatigue and privation" or passing references to sample acquisition difficulties. It also allowed the land's resistance to uniform definition to fall to the background as just another surmountable nuisance. In a positive light, this highlights Rogers's management ability, showing that it was solid enough to compose a clear report even though the avenues of communication were fraught with difficulty. In a more probing light, it appears that the transformation of raw, "natural" data from the field might not have been as unfiltered as the report would lead one to believe.⁴⁴

The example of marl analysis combines the three social dimensions outlined above—correspondence, network creation, and rhetorical output—while helping to frame the agricultural import of the geological survey. Marl samples were mailed to Rogers in Charlottesville, the contributors who sent them thus became involved in the process of the survey, and the annual reports distributed the analytical results that had been sought.⁴⁵

The map of Virginia indicates five basic regions, the first two of which were heavy marling territory. The marling activity of the survey—that is, identifying, mining, spreading, and testing marl—was set against a pre-existing background of fertilizing experimentation. Edmund Ruffin's advocacy of marl, highlighting its benefits for improving soil and society in his Essay on Calcareous Manures, had first been published in 1832, just three years before the Rogers Survey.⁴⁶ Rogers, as noted, had contributed an article on marl analysis to The Farmer's Register in 1834. A prime motivating factor for authorizing the survey had been to identify and thus provide better access to the fertilizers already available across the state. These too—marl, lime, and other fertilizers—were as much on Governor Floyd's mind as ore and coal when he asked to look for the "wealth buried in the earth."

Rogers believed that the task of unearthing fertilizing wealth was relatively easy. He argued in his 1837 report that from "the extent of its exposures in many places, from its great richness in carbonate of lime, and from the facility with which, without any previous preparation, it can be applied to the soil," the only thing left "for the attention of agriculturalists" was to identify the location of the marl and to evaluate its quality. After several years of survey results had been compiled, Rogers proudly presented a comprehensive table of "every variety of marl met with" in the eastern farming district of the state in his 1839 report.⁴⁷ There had been scattered tables in the previous volumes, so the 1839 version was but the tabulated culmination of the fertilizing arm of the survey. Those summaries of the description and composition of samples included in the annual reports illustrate a process that began with soil, in the countryside or on a farm, and ended with an analyzed scientific specimen.⁴⁸

A large number of the letters and samples came from the marl region labeled "Miocene"—region 1 on the map of Figure 1. In the cases shown in Figure 2, the new network of sample contributors included the likes of Mr. Bagby and Mr. Pollard of King and Queen County and Mr. Cabell of Lancaster County—this was Joseph Cabell, the friend of Rogers's mentioned above. They too were participants in the survey and part of the explanation for the project's agricultural value. From them, Rogers collected, analyzed, and collated the marl samples, creating a classification. There were white, blue, and yellow marls, and yellow, green, and light sands, for example. Verbal descriptions of the samples were also included. Some shells were "finely decomposed and partially cemented" while others were but "fragments of shells." Some were "tenacious" while others were "in nodules." In sum, the survey provided details on marl quality as understood by the quantity of carbonate of lime—the active ingredient—which, for a local farmer, could be compared with samples from adjoining lands. The tables offered, at least in principle, the possibility for leveraging newer, more quantified means of fertilizer analysis. What is more, within the scope of a statewide survey, the fertilizers could be understood across the state by their common features, so that the difference between Tidewater marl and Piedmont marl was not their local source, but their percentage of carbonate of lime.

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Figure 1. A Partially Completed Geological Map of Virginia.

Richard Stephenson and Marianne McKee, eds., Virginia in Maps: Four Centuries of Settlement, Growth, and Development (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2000), 178.
This map by William Rogers shows basic zones of the state, 1835 (modified with my numerical annotation). The eastern section represents the tidewater and peninsular marl regions, here labeled "1." The piedmont ("2") extends from the marl region to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the middle of the state. The Shenandoah Valley ("3"), the slim diagonal on the map, is between the Blue Ridge to the east and the Alleghany to the west. That Alleghany region is divided into two parts–"4" on the eastern half, and "5," the western coal fields.

Figure 2. Detail of a Miocene Marl Table of Analytical Results.

Rogers, "Report of the Progress of the Geological Survey for the Year 1837," in Geology of the Virginias, 151.
The first column indicates the marl contributor; the second column offers a verbal description of the sample; the third column provides the analytically determined carbonate of lime composition of the marl.

The results of the analyses served the professor well, as they helped solidify geological ideas about the relative ages of layers of earth.⁴⁹ The results also served the state constituency by proving "useful to individuals interested in knowing the value of their marls," as one annual review put it.⁵⁰ To make his point more salient, Rogers reminded those authorizing the work that "further detailed information in regards to [the analyzed] rocks [was] important in their application to agricultural and agricultural purposes." He even provided still more analyses, beyond the original protocol, to substantiate his point.⁵¹ In the process of analyzing marl, Rogers performed a subtle and helpful maneuver: By taking the work of marling farmers into the statewide authority of the survey, he had reconfigured the sense of "value" to the benefit of both him and the citizens of Virginia. Marl analysis appealed simultaneously to Rogers own theoretical designs, the farmers' pursuit of economic benefit, and the state delegates' demand for political utility.

The example of marl analysis shows that Rogers was first responsible for taking "information" from the field and, second, making meaningful data from it. He also had to define meaningful data to a governing body not as competent in terminology and technique. This was a process of translation and redefinition from the idiom of field studies to lab manipulation to public report: On the front half of that process, for example and as given in Figure 2, was Colonel Branam's piece of marl from Lancaster County; on the back half, a 21.5 percent carbonate of lime specimen of blue, tenacious, small shelled Miocene marl, with traces of green sand. Another central element to the survey's success, explored next, was the use of instrumental and analytical equipment in the field and lab to produce those quantified representations—"21.5 percent"—of the natural features of the state.

INSTRUMENTS, MEASUREMENT, AND ANALYSES

THE MATERIAL AND technical dimensions of the survey work were part of the same process of creating environmental knowledge characterized by the social elements above. They included the general use of chemistry and geology as tools for inquiry across the state, the deployment of field-based instruments, such as thermometers, for examining features of the natural landscape, and the use of specific analytical instruments, such as the marl analyzer, to study compositions and qualities of soil and fertilizers. (Rogers and his assistants, of course, also were analyzing a broad range of geological features along the lines of identifying rock formations, directions, strata, and age.)

An appendix to Rogers's 1837 report indicates the primary and multi-faceted role chemistry played for the practical benefits of the research to the state citizenry: "The amount of chemical investigations thus bestowed upon the materials of economical value, collected in our explorations or forwarded to us from localities not visited, though not mentioned in the annual reports, forms a very important item in the yearly operations of the laboratory, furnishing useful facts and valuable suggestions in relation to the nature and appropriate application of our marls, limestones, iron ores, and other important mineral resources, and thus silently, but largely and continually, diffusing information of immediate practical utility to persons in every district of the state."⁵²

Rogers speaks to several issues here, reinforcing many of the broader meanings of the survey in general. For one thing, he acknowledges that more material is being sent to him and analyzed in his lab than he can report, since he still receives many more specimens from "localities not visited." For another, chemical analysis is the tool being used to achieve his goals. In a third instance, the information "of immediate practical utility" is being diffused not just from Rogers to the state constituents, but between local areas amongst themselves—"silently" and thus invisibly. And finally, all of these activities are presented as useful and directly beneficial to the citizens of Virginia, yet again justifying the agricultural import of the survey while illuminating the tension between practical and theoretical pursuits.

Consider specifically the process for analyzing water samples. Many of the water "specimens" came to Rogers from spring operators in the mid-Shenandoah Valley—Hot Springs, Warm Springs, White Sulphur Springs, Red Sulphur Springs, Sweet Springs, etc. The contributors, aware of Rogers's work and tapping into the possibilities of commercial advance, wanted to capitalize on the association of mineral springs and health.⁵³ From the Shenandoah Valley or west, John Sites of Rawley Springs, William Seymour of Howard's Lick Spring, and Samuel McCamant of Grayson Courthouse, sought analytical assistance for their springs. Hezekiah Daggs, another neighbor from the Shenandoah Valley, wanted to leverage all manner of analysis from Rogers, asking for a chemical examination of not just his spring water but also limestone and other field rocks. At least one gentleman, from the Black Sulphur Springs Company, sought mineral-water analysis in what he thought was compliance with a law that required official measurement of mineral content for spring operators. It may be that the businessman was misled or misunderstood state law (or that I just cannot find the legislation to back it up), but either way, water samples made it to Rogers from a variety of sources.⁵⁴ The traffic of mineral water samples was fairly heavy.

To analyze these samples, Rogers combined field work with lab work. At the springs, his assistants measured temperatures; in Charlottesville he ran evaporations on boiler plates. The purpose was to define the chemical proportions of the resulting precipitate: sulphate of lime, sulphate of magnesia, carbonate of lime, chloride of sodium, and so on. Rogers also calculated the volume of the gases let off from the process. For the most part, these included nitrogen, carbonic acid, oxygen, and sulphuretted hydrogen. Figure 3 is one example.

Figure 3. Selection of Analytical Results from Mineral Springs.

Rogers, "Analyses of Waters of the Principal Mineral Springs of Virginia," as reprinted in Geology of the Virginias, 555.

Figure 4. A Hypsometer.

David Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 151.
This hypsometer, or boiling-point apparatus, is of the kind used on the Virginia survey.

The details are many, as Rogers included the analytical results of some thirty springs. His reports included an eighteen-page section devoted just to the mineral-water analyses. The details are just as great for analyses of soil and rocks, samples of which were examined for reasons similar to water, even if unrelated to health. The analytical procedure Rogers used on rock and soil was fairly straightforward, generally treating the soil with hydrochloric acid, then with ammonia, and then drying it to leave a mineral precipitate.⁵⁵ Dozens of pages of results for iron, lead, soil in general, limestone, and marl also complement the point already illustrated with spring water that Rogers had taken water samples from their sources, collected them in a laboratory, placed them under analysis, and reissued them in his reports as lists of chemical constituents.

Two more brief examples—thermometers and the marl analyzing apparatus—help delineate the ways material elements of the survey worked to produce new, more scientific descriptions of the state's features. Overall, the strictly physical artifacts on the survey were less than ideal or pristine, as plates, glassware, heating elements, receptacles, and soap dishes made difficult travel companions. Thermometers too were well-used and often broken. They were used to measure altitude by relative comparisons of the boiling point of water and to gauge evaporations and distillations. Rogers reported that the boiling-point thermometer "promises to afford us great facilities... and enable us to continue our tracings with all the accuracy and expedition that could be desired."⁵⁶ He estimated that "altitude [boiling-point] thermometers... from their portable form, and the ease of observing with them, were found to be particularly valuable especially in districts of a very rugged topography." Furthermore, he claimed that the "employment of the thermometer" was able "to facilitate some of the most difficult explorations" the team was called upon to make.⁵⁷ The thermometers were a crucial piece of measuring equipment for the work of the survey.

But it was not so easy. In 1839, James Rogers wrote to his brother and boss not only that his horse was sick and the weather was bad, but that his boiling-point thermometer was broken. In consecutive letters he pleaded with William for shipment of new thermometers. In May 1840, the youngest survey assistant, Caleb Briggs, made special mention of the successful transport of his boiling-point thermometer to the northern part of the western zone, while another assistant, Israel Slade, a month later and farther south, was forced to call for a new one when his broke. Briggs's luck was limited though, since a year later he, too, broke his thermometer—twice. Thomas Ridgeway, deep in the mountains of western Virginia, outright bemoaned the state of his fragile boiling-point thermometer, but perhaps his irritation was understandable since the instrument broke after a hornet had stung Ridgeway on the ear, causing him to knock it over.⁵⁸

Besides visualizing the everyday problems of field workers in the backwoods of Virginia that belie Rogers's easy gloss on their ease of use, it is interesting to see how the meaning of the survey as a space between instruments and the landscape was produced. To do so, the troubles with thermometry were gracefully smoothed over in the annual report as above (another rhetorical accomplishment), with claims to "ease," "accuracy," and "expedition." Rogers's distanced review of the value of instrumentation was ironic and misleading, not just because the claims to "accuracy and expedition" were deceptive, but doubly so because in rugged topography the ease of use would be even more difficult—a hornet's stinger might cause equipment to tumble and break in the mountains, while on level ground this would be less likely.

The thermometer as a mundane device of analysis provides just one example of the problems of using instruments in the field. Those problems not only required the same invisibility Rogers took note of with the excess of sample analyses, but were necessary for the translation of local soil, rock, and water into simple sources of analysis. A specimen from the valley might be unique to that region, as John Sites of Rawley Springs assumed when he asked for a water analysis, but its composition was characterized by universally defined components. Just as the only difference between Tidewater marl and Piedmont marl was the relative percentage of carbonate of lime, the difference between Hot Springs and Rawley Springs mineral water was the quantity of sulphate of magnesia, among other elements.

The marl analyzing instrument, a second ex-ample of a survey instrument, was as commonly used as the thermo-meter. As I noted, the annual reports are rife with lengthy tables of analytical results of marl examinations.⁵⁹ Rogers used the apparatus of Figure 5 for his marl analyses. It consisted of a light bulb of glass ("A") into which the sample was placed, a piston-like cork ("C") used to inject acid to drive off the gaseous components (carbonic acid) locked into the marl, and a third tube ("B") extending from the bulb to filter escaping gas. The entire apparatus was countered by a balance which would gauge the change in weight affected by the escaped gas. After performing the procedure, Rogers or "any farmer who uses calcareous manures" could calculate the amount of carbonate of lime. The operator would put a known quantity of powdered marl into the glass bulb with "a little water." Gas was then injected into the bulb drop by drop via the cork—Rogers used muriatic acid, or hydrochloric acid, as it is known today. The effervescing sample was left to rest for an hour or until all the gas had escaped into tube "B." By measuring that weight loss from the original marl sample, one could calculate how much carbonate of lime had been in the original marl sample.⁶⁰

Figure 5. Apparatus for Analyzing Marl.

First presented by W. B. Rogers in The Farmer's Register 2 (1834): 364–65.

The apparatus under Rogers's domain was laboratory equipment. But as an agent of the state assembly, the university, and the citizens who had sent him samples, Rogers was not studying nature in a disembodied, abstract sense. Science, in its most general definition, is of course the study of nature, but describing it with such generality loses the direct, physical referent of "nature" and drifts into idealistic abstraction. Rogers, however, was studying nature as physical matter, as samples in his lab that were the source of agricultural production, the very basis for Virginia's political economy. His technique and instruments were self-advertised as enabling "the operator [the farmer] to proceed with great accuracy and despatch [sic]," values that fit the ethic of agrarian citizens and characterized the instrument as equally suitable in the barnyard or the lab.⁶¹ Here Rogers, intentionally or not, blurred the two senses of nature—the abstract idea and the physical material—thereby making the work of the survey and the analysis of the potential fertilizer relevant to the range of state agents who sought its benefits.

The case of the survey might be more centrally about the development of science were it not for its concrete object of inquiry, the land of Virginia, and for the inherent and foundational involvement of actors from around the state, the local farmers, businessmen, and politicians who participated in and received the results of the survey. The mobilization of social elements with the use of material tools worked to define the meaning of the survey; that survey became a tool for improvement predicated on the value of scientific inquiry and the goal of statewide improvement. The lesson of these surveys is not that all Virginians became scientifically inclined, nor that they accepted wholesale the authority of technical mediation as a solution to farming problems, but that it was now possible for these things to happen. Virginians were producing new kinds of knowledge about their environment and doing it with statewide coordination and technical specificity.

LEGACIES DIRECT AND CONCEPTUAL

FOR ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORIANS, the state scientific survey offers several lessons. It provides a view into the processes and goals of a prominent project meant to put a finer gaze on nature. It allows us to see, in Virginia's case, how scientific practices actually were produced in the agricultural fields, valleys, riverbeds, mineral springs, coal fields, mountainsides, and labs of antebellum America, offering new descriptions of those areas in the process. It also provides a view not just of geological investigations, as the Virginian project's name would imply, but of the growing circulation of agricultural scientific practices in the early republic South.

For Virginians themselves, the survey aided the multivalent cause of internal improvement—in its agricultural, cultural, and economic dimensions—by producing new scientific descriptors of at least three different environmental forums: land already cultivated but improvable, land not yet cultivated but capable of being so, and land bearing theretofore unknown wealth under its surface. Through its organizational, rhetorical, and other technological features, the project characterized a process by which scientific views of the state's natural resources could be produced. This case shows as well that statewide citizens, the non-authorized everyday practitioners who helped Rogers, such as Daggs, Branam, Cabell, Bagby, Pollard, Sites, Seymour, McCamant, and hundreds more, were active agents in the production of scientific means for improvement ends, interested in complementing their traditional means for land management with newer techniques.⁶² As a study in environmental history, the survey thus makes apparent a new mode of interaction between people and their land, more so than a revolutionary mode of production on that land.

The full legacy of Virginia's survey cannot be characterized in a straightforward manner. It is best instead to evaluate it in two senses, direct and conceptual. In direct practical terms, the project experienced a distinct dénouement. The state assembly voted in its 1841 session to repeal the survey's funding as of January 1, 1842. This abrupt end was certainly harsh for Rogers and his patrons in the state assembly. The demise of the project was not, however, unexpected. Rogers knew from conversation with his brother, Henry, busy running the surveys of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, that surveys all around the Union were in as much danger by the later 1830s as they were in favor earlier that decade. The eventual effects of the 1837 recession influenced this trend to a large degree, as funding was tight in all states and science was not quite the secure investment it might be later in history. The Ohio survey was cut short in 1838; Indiana and Massachusetts suspended their surveys in 1839. Henry's Pennsylvania survey lasted until 1842, although New Jersey's funding ended in 1840.⁶³

Issuing a final, comprehensive report was clearly the most desired direct legacy of the survey in Rogers's mind. He considered it "the crowning work of the survey, from which alone a just estimate of its high economical and scientific value can be formed." But it was never written. Historians of geology have assessed Rogers's tempered success with that metric of achievement, noting that the survey's "failure" was its lack of that final report.⁶⁴ Throughout the execution of the survey, Rogers was constantly campaigning at the Board of Public Works for more funding, emphasizing the "value" and "patriotic" purpose of the work in anticipation of having the resources to write that last report.⁶⁵ Though Rogers was in fact granted an additional $2,500 in 1841, it was not enough. Increasing tension at Rogers's home base at the University in Charlottesville—student riots plagued the campus in the early 1840s—and long-term planning with Henry that eventually would take him to Boston prevented the completion of that report. Not until forty years later did his widow, Emma Rogers, publish the annual reports together in one bound set.

A second direct measure of the survey's success would be how much actual land improvement was afforded or caused by the survey itself, as such addressing an initial basic justification of the project by answering the question: was Virginia's productivity improved? Virginians often thought so, claiming at agricultural society meetings and in the rural press that the new knowledge of agricultural improvement, of which survey science was a part, had made old lands more productive.⁶⁶ Bolstering the qualitative outlooks, census figures from the late antebellum period recorded the acreage of "improved" and "unimproved" farmland, data that would be useful for assessing such scientific influence. State agents likely had such figures in mind—10,360,135 acres of "improved" farmland, as measured in the 1850 census. However, while those numbers were suitable for citizens and politicians of the time, they offer little help to historians today: there was no benchmark from before the survey against which to compare, since the mid-century census was the first to record such statistics. And to be sure, various assessments of productivity improvements were almost always imbued with political interest, not the least of which were competing assessments from local southerners and visiting northerners interested in demonstrating the success or failure, respectively, of the slave-based agricultural system. As is evident from a preponderance of conflicting anecdotal and statistical evidence, seeking to show that the survey caused Virginian agrarians to change immediately their farming practices or that, furthermore, the legacy of the survey was to impose a standard scientific protocol onto land management as measurable by acreage productivity addresses the wrong issues and asks the wrong questions.⁶⁷ The survey's lasting legacy was more subtle than such direct metrics can demonstrate.

The conceptual and philosophical legacies of surveying for how we interact with and define the land were far-reaching. First, the survey left a record of cataloging "the native resources of our common country," in Rogers' words, of producing a summary of the state's natural wealth.⁶⁸ It provided this catalog through rhetorical representations in annual reports, with analytical results of scores of specimen evaluations, by the visual representation of rock strata and other geological features in diagrams, composite sketches, and other illustrations accompanying the report—actual maps of the direction, depth, variability, and prominence of different types of rock formations under the visible surface of the land—and in the cabinet of specimens accrued over the course of the project.

Second, Rogers maintained and elevated his own prominence in the state, a point that goes beyond simple biography and into the realm of scientific agricultural history. His increasing fame is an indication to historians of the higher degree of visibility for scientific solutions to agro-economic problems. A writer to The Southern Planter in 1841 thought the problems of agriculture then under debate could be resolved if they simply asked "Professor Rodgers [sic] to turn the light of science upon this [issue of fertilizer], or any other important subject of agriculture." The next year, another writer explained in an article titled "Agricultural Analysis" that "Every farmer should understand the nature and composition of his soils, and may do so with little time, and at a mere trifle of expense."⁶⁹ He was referring to analytical instruments like those Rogers used. The statewide Virginia Agricultural Society formed in 1845 to give further systematic attention to improvement polices, taking its mission from the work of Rogers and well-established county-based society activities across the state. By the 1850s, the government employed a state agricultural chemist dedicated to analyzing fertilizer samples and other agricultural products.

Contemporaneously, the status of agricultural chemistry was being given far greater attention, with Humphry Davy's organically defined fertility theories of the 1810s being supplanted by the mechanistic theories of the chemist Justus von Liebig in the 1840s. That shift in environmental conceptualization has been well characterized by Carolyn Merchant: "As mechanists gained victory over vitalists, they were simultaneously transforming grains and fertilizers into scientific objects, farms and fields into laboratories, and farmers into chemists." Survey science serves to further underscore her point, with surveys supplying the forum for making the value of chemical analysis apparent. Evidence of statewide participation in the survey from everyday farms and planters makes the presence of and familiarity with agro-scientific analyses clearer. Surveys were a part of the transition in which, to quote Merchant again, "the field had been reconstructed as a laboratory" and the environment could be defined with scientific practices.⁷⁰ Rogers, for us, represents that reconstruction and the node through which non-specialist farmers joined the process of quantified redefinition.

Third, the survey contributed to a view of shifting perceptions of nature as gauged by a local/universal tension. By introducing a scientific process, local notions of land and nature were interpretable in a standardized way. George Perkins Marsh wrote in 1860 that "In proportion to man's advance in natural knowledge... is his emancipation from... local causes."⁷¹ The premises that underlined scientific practices of the decades before Marsh's comment provided the conditions that gave it meaning. In fact, the belief that surveyors could escape locality by providing a "unified, clear picture of Nature," in the historian Michele Aldrich's words, was a guiding assumption of the entire state survey era. When Robert Mills, for example, the northwestern Virginian with various hopes of material progress, wrote to Rogers asking for a copy of the reports, he was tapping into a new method for improving his lands. He assumed that whatever Rogers had collected in the report would have a direct effect on his property, the need for translation to local conditions being unnecessary. Likewise, the carbonate of lime in marl or the sulphate of magnesia in mineral springs bore no reference to locality. They were just so many quantified units of universal ingredients. The goal for Mills, Marsh, Rogers, and Rogers's new correspondents, such as Hezekiah Daggs, was to make local places scientifically known and thus erase the constraints of unique and uncodifiable land. Fortunately for Virginians, the goal of providing a clear, unified picture of Nature served the practical political interests and Rogers's specific academic goals. Having state support, broad geographical aims, and a common method and purpose meant that the environment could be described and acted upon in a more totalizing manner.

The era of federal surveys in the later nineteenth century soon followed that of the states, which had ebbed by the 1840s. John Wesley Powell, for one, led the U.S. Geological Survey's project across the west in the 1870s, the details of which have been well-canvassed by Donald Worster and others.⁷² Those details were, in fact, more strictly geological than Virginia's agriculturally interested project, perhaps encouraging the geological tenor in later historical scholarship about surveys. But those projects did not arrive sui generis, instead relying on institutional, conceptual, and logistical scientific accomplishments of the half-century before. The second era of state surveys began toward the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Rogers Survey is referred to as Virginia's first state survey, not just to distinguish it from Thomas Jefferson's less organized though more ambitious project of the 1780s, but because the state geological department still in existence today—under the jurisdiction of Virginia's Department of Mining, Minerals, and Energy—has been running what amounts to the second state survey since the early 1900s. Not surprisingly, and apropos of Virginia's agricultural heritage, an aborted 1904–1906 effort was structured by and then reported to the State Board of Agriculture and Immigration, reinforcing the land-based character and the cultural impetus—in part to redress emigration—of the first survey, while the 1908 Geological Survey of Virginia project that still operates today was funded to coordinate mineral and water analyses with the bureaucratically larger U.S. Geological Survey.⁷³

Virginia's first survey, meanwhile, a product of the antebellum improvement ethos, helps place early scientific evaluations of nature into a richer historical context. The project, a collection of technical activities, became an instrument itself, both enabling improvement and chronicling it. It provided the space for new technical means to be developed for the sake of environmental knowledge. Survey science offered a complementary way to interact with the land—with analysis, with specimen acquisition, with fertilizing experiments—and so come to know it through different means. The process of codifying nature resulting from this new interaction appears straightforward in retrospect, suggesting a sort of inevitable accrual of measurements, observations, and analyses that leads to a scientifically describable environment. But the process itself reveals nature's resistance to this codification. The broken thermometers, undisciplined networks of communication, damaged roads, thick-brushed hillsides, realities of inconvenience, and unreliability were local natural factors that had to be overcome, ignored, or glossed over to report a nature that becomes uniform and thus uniformly improvable. In the end, the survey's legacy must be treated for its value as representative of antebellum environmental mentalities, its expression of scientific knowledge-making of nature, and its example of introducing more codified views of nature to those who worked the land as the basis of their daily lives and to the state's political economy.

Benjamin R. Cohen is assistant professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia. His work focuses on the historically contingent ways in which science and technology mediate human knowledge of the environment. He currently is revising his manuscript, Notes from the Ground: Science and Agricultural Improvement in the Early Republic, for publication.

NOTES

I would like to thank Mark Cioc, Adam Rome, and two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions and encouragement; and Mark Barrow, Tim Luke, Wyatt Galusky, Jody Roberts, Michael Egan, and Jane Lehr for their assistance and general good cheer. For their feedback, I thank the audiences and participants at the 2003 meeting of the American Society for Environmental History and the 2003 SHOT-ASEH workshop on "Monitoring the Environment: Scales, Methods, and Systems in Historical Perspective"; and, for his encouragement and good bread, Joe Baker.

^1. John Floyd, "Address to the State Senate," Journal of the Senate, of the Commonwealth of Virginia, [1833–1834] (Richmond, 1833), 10; and William Barton Rogers, "Report from the Select Committee of the General Assembly of Virginia, To Whom Was Referred Certain Memorials From Morgan, Frederick, and Shenandoah Counties, Praying for a Geological Survey of the State, With a View to the Discovery and Development of Its Geological and Mineral Resources," in A Reprint of Annual Reports and Other Papers, on the Geology of the Virginias (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1884), 754–62 (hereafter cited as Geology of the Virginias).

^2. Hezekiah Daggs to W. B. Rogers, March 23, 1837, Geological Survey Papers, Accession Number 24815, Box 1, Folder 2, Board of Public Works Records, Record Group 51, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Va. (hereafter cited as GSP, LVA).

^3. William Barton Rogers, "Analyses of Marl, Sand, and Soils," 1835, in GSP, Box 4, Folder 2, LVA.

^4. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffleton (1787; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 5–79; and National Research Council (U.S.) Committee on State Geological Surveys, Summary Information on the State Geological Surveys & the United States Geological Survey Bulletin of the National Research Council (Washington, D.C.: National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, 1932), 111–15.

^5. In many cases, improvement advocates were quite forthright that a more scientific agriculture would also save the slave system. Edmund Ruffin, for example, expressed the view in Essay on Calcareous Manures (1832; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961) that introducing the science of agriculture to the state would strengthen the slave-based political economy. Improvement advocates from other states sometimes argued the exact opposite. The Pennsylvanian John Lorain, for example, argued that more scientific agriculture would eliminate the need for slave labor in Nature and Reason Harmonized in the Practice of Husbandry (Philadelphia, Pa.: H.C. Carey & I. Lea, 1825). Nevertheless, for the sake of clarity, the dynamics of slave labor will not be foregrounded here. This is not to downplay the very central role slave labor played in Virginia's agriculture, but to note that interlacing those details into the more thoroughly documented survey papers would take away from the main points sought here. For a thorough analysis of population, labor, and cultural statistics in antebellum Virginia, see William Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993). For further discussion of slave labor, science, and Virginian agricultural improvements, see B. R. Cohen, "Notes from the Ground: Science and Agricultural Improvement in the Early American Republic" (PhD diss., Virginia Tech, 2005), chap. 4.

^6. The assumed credibility of science to define nature is something often taken for granted in debates about the role of science in environmental history. Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), for example, notes that "before the twentieth century... no one knew the chemistry behind any process" of fertilization (17), tacitly accepting that chemistry is the most acceptable way to know the land. Jack Temple Kirby, Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), xiii, credits the observation that "nitrogen-poor and acidic" soil produced southern soil crises, although such descriptions of the soil were still very much contested during the early nineteenth century. Whether these are accurate ways to know and adequate terms and concepts to describe soil and fertility, those terms and concepts took a great deal of work to become culturally dominant. Additionally, while Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) explores the roots of ecological science; David Demeritt, "Ecology, Objectivity, and Critique in Writings on Nature and Human Societies," Journal of Historical Geography 20 (1994): 22–37; and William Cronon, "Cutting Loose or Running Aground?" Journal of Historical Geography 20 (1994): 38–43, take it for granted in their debate that ecology is the field to be understood without discussing the wide range of sciences involved in defining, altering, and exploring the environment nor the actual historical settings in which science became connected to the land in meaningful ways. Richard White, "Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning," Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1111–16, in conversation with Worster, also discusses the role ecology plays in writing environmental history, though without indicating the role of other sciences. More recently, Ed Russell, "Evolutionary History: Prospectus for a New Field," Environmental History 6 (2003): 204–28, has asked for an increased range of attention to sciences other than ecology and public health.

^7. This article does not provide the definitive exegesis of Virginia's first survey. Further details have been described in several short articles elsewhere, along with cursory biographical details of Rogers. See William Ernst, "William Barton Rogers: Antebellum Virginia Geologist," Virginia Cavalcade 24 (Summer 1974): 13–21; Michele Aldrich and Alan Leviton, "William Barton Rogers and the Virginia Geological Survey, 1835–1842," in James X. Corgan, ed., The Geological Sciences in the Antebellum South (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1982), 83–89; Robert Milici and C. R. Bruce Hobbs, Jr., "William Barton Rogers and the First Geological Survey of Virginia, 1835–1841," Earth Science History 6 (1987): 3–13; and Sean P. Adams, "Partners in Geology, Brothers in Frustration: The Antebellum Geological Surveys of Virginia and Pennsylvania," The Virginia Magazine of Biography and History 106 (1998): 5–34. Also, consult the reprints of the annual reports published by Emma Savage Rogers later in the century (1884), cited above as Rogers, Geology of the Virginias. Archival material for the survey is available at the Library of Virginia (LVA) and the MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, MC-1 (hereafter cited as Rogers Family Papers, MIT). Finally, Emma Rogers edited and published William Rogers's letters in Life and Letters of William Barton Rogers, 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1896).

^8. On the broader state survey movement see Michele Aldrich, "American State Geological Surveys, 1820–1845," in Two Hundred Years of Geology in America, ed. Cecil Schneer (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1979), 133–44; Anne Millbrooke, "State Geological Surveys of the Nineteenth Century" (PhD diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1981); Arthur Socolow, ed., The State Geological Surveys: A History (Association of American State Geologists, 1988); Corgan, ed., Geological Sciences in the Antebellum South; Sean Patrick Adams, "Old Dominions and Industrial Commonwealths: The Political Economy of Coal in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1810–1875" (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999); and Michele Aldrich, The New York Natural History Survey, 1836–1842 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Paleontological Research Institute, 2000). Two other recent articles offer additional context with their focus on the Pennsylvania and North Carolina surveys: Francis Boscoe, "'The Insanities of an Exalted Imagination': The Troubled First Geological Survey of Pennsylvania," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 127: (2003): 291–308; and Michael S. Smith, "The Conflict between 'Practical Utility' and Geology: Denison Olmstead, Elisha Mitchell, and the 1823 to 1828 Geological Surveys of North Carolina," Southeastern Geology 38 (1999): 145–54.
Earlier compendiums on geological surveys include George Merrill, The First One Hundred Years of American Geology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924), 127–208; and George Merrill, ed., Contributions to a History of American State Geological and Natural History Surveys, Smithsonian Institution, Bulletin 109 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920). Hugh Slotten, Patronage, Practice, and the Culture of American Science: Alexander Dallas Bache and the US Coast Survey (New York: Cambridge University Press 1994) provides a good example of surveys as aiding the growing cultural authority of science in American society by offering places of employment, opportunities to refine technique, and venues in which to develop and test theories. His example is given in the context of the U.S. Coastal Survey. Stephen Turner, "The Survey in Nineteenth Century American Geology: The Evolution of a Form of Patronage," Minerva 25 (1987): 282–330, describes the survey as the first legitimate source of patronage for American scientists. In environmental history proper, the surveys generally have been studied in their federal form and as part of the story of the development of the West. See, for example, Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and William Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: the Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Knopf, 1966).

^9. Worster, A River Running West, 203.

^10. David Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003); Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth; and Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Merchant's earlier work, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1980), provides an even larger historical view of this shift from animistic, organic philosophies of nature to more mechanistic ones.

^11. Despite its rich historiography, Virginia has nonetheless suffered from relatively little attention to its environmental history. On this lack of attention, see Jack Temple Kirby, "Virginia's Environmental History: A Prospectus," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 99 (1990): 449–88. This is not to suggest that no work has been done. For a view of eighteenth-century Virginia, see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). For a view of seventeenth-century Virginia, see Stephen Adams, The Best and Worst Country in the World: Perspectives on the Early Virginia Landscape (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001). For other work that either aims directly at or touches on the environmental history of Virginia, see Joan Cashin, "Landscape and Memory in Antebellum Virginia," VMHB 102 (1994): 477–500; Donald Davis, Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Ronald Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Warren Hofstra, The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). On the dearth of southern environmental history in general, see Otis L. Graham, "Again the Backward Region? Environmental History in and of the American South," Southern Cultures 6 (2000): 50–72; and Mart Stewart, "Southern Environmental History," in A Companion to the American South, ed. John Boles (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002), 411–23. Notable exceptions to the claim that the South lacks fully developed environmental histories are Albert Cowdrey, This Land, This South: An Environmental History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983); Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Kirby, Poquosin; Mart A. Stewart, "What Nature Suffers to Groe": Lift, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); and Philip Curtin, ed., Discovering the Chesapeake: The History of an Ecosystem (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

^12. Environmental historians have done significant work emphasizing how humans manipulate, control, and value their natural surroundings and how non-human elements shape society. Beyond the ecological sciences, though—and as pointed out in note 6—they have written relatively little about how scientific practice became the primary mediator between humans and their surroundings, acting as the form of interaction by which humans conceptualize what they are manipulating, controlling, and valuing. By emphasizing the active processes within the survey and characterizing the survey as a whole as a form of interaction, I consider it a kind of active work through which knowledge of the land can be developed. This conceptualization is consistent with the scholarship of Richard White, who foregrounds the forms of direct engagement by which humans come to know their environments. It also first accepts, but then diverges from, Donald Worster's call some years ago for more attention to the agro-economic modes of production in environmental history: The survey was indeed an agro-economic endeavor, but in this article I characterize it as a mode of interaction, not a mode of production. See Richard White, "Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?" in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995), 171–85; Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); and Donald Worster, "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History," Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1087–1106.

^13. Improvement and the survey were more intimately related than most historical studies reflect. For example, the 1843 report Improvements in Agriculture and Arts authored by the U.S. commissioner of patents "only once mentioned machines or implements in connection with improvement; instead, [it] named geological surveys, agricultural societies, rural periodicals, and sobriety as pillars of improvement," as noted by Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 192.

^14. See George Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); Sally Kohlstedt, The Formation of the American Scientific Community: The American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1846–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976); Alexandra Oleson and Sanborn Brown, eds., The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic: American Scientific and Learned Societies from Colonial Times to the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Corgan, ed., Geological Sciences in the Antebellum South; Nathan Reingold, Science, American Style (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991); and Slotten, Patronage, Practice, and the Culture of American Science.

^15. For the official wording of the legislation, see "An Act to Authorize a Geological Reconnaissance of the State, With a View to the Chemical Composition of Its Soils, Minerals, and Mineral Waters," as reprinted in Rogers, Geology of the Virginias, 762. The political impetus for the survey is consistent with the justifications of several other eastern states, as shown in Millbrooke, "State Geological Surveys of the Nineteenth Century," 32–133; and Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 69–169. For more about the general political and economic aspects of antebellum Virginia's agricultural situation, see Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 13–66; Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion, 30–49; and Kirby, Poquosin. Each author refers to and moves beyond Avery Craven, Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606–1860 (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1926) as an early source on the relation of soil exhaustion to demographic shift.

^16. John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), provides an excellent review of state and federal political dynamics of improvement projects. He notes, in particular, that "Madison's veto of the [1817] Bonus Bill [proposed by John Calhoun to use money from the new National Bank to support Federal Internal Improvements] effectively spread the burden of internal improvements, at least for the moment, on the backs of the states or private enterprise" (69). Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion, offers extended commentary on Whigs and Democrats in 1830s Virginia that makes even that smaller state and private enterprise locus more complex.

^17. This means that the novelty of the scientific survey was its new way to identify natural resources, not that nature was a set of resources to be identified. See Aldrich, New York Natural History Survey, 35–56, for a discussion of the assumptions of the survey movement. For deeper analyses of the rise of mechanistic and materialist philosophies of nature into the nineteenth century, see Merchant, Death of Nature, and Merchant, Ecological Revolutions. See also Cohen, "Notes from the Ground," chap. 3.

^18. Aldrich, The New York Natural History Survey, 54; Floyd, "Address to the State Senate," 10; Peter Browne, as quoted in Boscoe, "'The Insanities of an Exalted Imagination,'" 291. Speaking in negation, Thomas Jefferson had long before repeated the premise of poor soil by mingling financial and nature-based metaphors of wealth, observing that "the earth is readily impoverished [when planters work] beyond the power of nature," as quoted in Frederick Siegel, The Roots of Southern Distinctiveness: Tobacco and Society in Danville, VA, 1780–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 63. These views of Floyd, Browne, Clinton, and Jefferson were characteristic of a much larger story of economic concepts of nature. Worster, Nature's Economy, makes this clear. See as well the collected essays in Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

^19. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to elaborate the causes of decline, it is worth noting that the consequences of soil exhaustion were as much cultural as agricultural. The loss of soil productivity in the eastern part of the state led in part to the decline of Old Virginia's country gentlemanly ethic, as too many decades of tobacco growing led to too many abandoned fields. A slave-based political economy had a good deal to do with this, of course, as plantation owners worked more hands in the field to produce even more tobacco. Economic competition from other states only added to the problem by luring away able-bodied farmers or by demonstrating alternative means for boosting local economies. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, for instance, was being credited for shifting commerce to the North and establishing New York as the new pre-eminent state. On these issues, see Craven, Soil Exhaustion; Lewis Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (New York: Peter Smith, 1933); Paul Gates, The Farmer's Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860 (New York: Harper Torchbooks); Clarence Danhof, Change in Agriculture: the Northern United States, 1820–1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth; Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion; and David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). On the Erie Canal's success and influence, see Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817–1862 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996).

^20. As quoted in Larson, Internal Improvement, 94–95.

^21. On the rural press, see Albert Demaree, The American Agricultural Press, 1819–1860 (1941; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 780–810; Gates, The Farmer's Age; Danhof, Change in Agriculture; Donald Marti, "Agricultural Journalism and the Diffusion of Knowledge: The First Half Century in America," Agricultural History 54 (1980): 37; Brenda Bullion, "The Agricultural Press: To Impro