History on the Rocks: Professor saves a rare archive from the junk heap
Released: April 15, 2003
On the eve of a major Upham Hall renovation project last year, UW-Whitewater geologist Rex Hanger volunteered for the less than thrilling task of sorting through piles of junk in the science building’s basement. Hanger was sent on a mission to retrieve anything of value from the heap of scrapped equipment, junk rags, debris and discarded rock collections.
It turned out that almost everything was landfill-worthy, except for a single unlabeled, three-foot-long wooden box. Inside it contained a 140-year-old bounty of scientific history — and a tangible connection to one of geology’s greatest minds.
“The box contained more than 130 fossil specimens with frayed, hand-written labels from the Whitewater Normal School Cabinet,” Hanger said. “Then what really made my jaw drop was that most of these labels had a line to ID the collector. On rock after rock, the signature was either TC Chamberlin or TCC.”
For most geologists, TCC — namely, Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin — is a household name, recognized as a leading light of the field. Some biographers have put Chamberlin on a par with Darwin or Newton in terms of his overall influence. He’s famous for developing a widely held theory on the age of the solar system, one that asserted Earth was far older than anyone could have fathomed in the late 1800s. He’s also considered the founding father of glacial geology, the first person to fully define how glaciers formed and shaped most of North America.
But before any of these claims to fame, Chamberlin was the founding geology professor at Whitewater Normal School, from 1868 to 1873. Like this amazing little fossil collection, his history here has been almost forgotten.
“His first professional geology job was here,” Hanger said. “From here, he went on to do everything.”
Chamberlin taught at Beloit College before becoming a professor and later president of UW-Madison, which has a Medical School building named after him. He led the Wisconsin Geological Survey, and he founded the University of Chicago’s geology department. “All these places are well-documented, but we’ve been sort of missed,” Hanger said. “His work came to full flower in Madison and Chicago, but the start of it all was here.”
As for Chamberlin’s rescued rock collection, Hanger said the specimens are not particularly rare but are very revealing of his traits as a scientist. All of them were hand-collected by Chamberlin from the southern Wisconsin countryside, including ones labeled from the Racine area, Oshkosh, Appleton and Beloit. Hanger said those collections — and the observations he gleaned along the way — likely formed the basis for his understanding of how glaciers scoured the land.
But finding the collection spurred Hanger to further research Chamberlin’s lost years at Whitewater. Mainly through detailed archives from the Whitewater Register, Hanger found records of a truly remarkable career here.
The fossil specimens were indicative of Chamberlin’s teaching style. Few used such props in the classroom in that era. He believed that geology needed to be experienced to be appreciated, which was a far cry from the stand-and-deliver norm.
He found Whitewater Register stories that detailed summer field trips he organized to Devil’s Lake near Baraboo, which was then a full-day ride by horse-drawn wagons. The students wrote back detailed letters of their exploration each summer, which were printed in the Register.
The newspaper also detailed a campus lecture by Chamberlin that dazzled the community and might be the first-ever slide show used in teaching. Chamberlin used the harsh flash of a calcium light to project images onto a wall.
A deeply religious man, Chamberlin found an interesting way to reconcile his Biblical and scientific beliefs. Only years removed from Darwin’s “Origin of the Species,” he would bill some lectures as “the Pre-Adamic History of Wisconsin,” meaning pre-Adam and Eve.
Chamberlin, who grew up in Beloit and earned his undergraduate degree from Beloit College, has another interesting tie to the region. He was principal of Delavan High School in the 1860s before deciding he want to pursue a higher degree, which led him to the University of Michigan.
So how important was Whitewater to Chamberlin? In letters he referred to the times as his “halcyon” and “carefree” days. Even more revealing was a comment he made at a Whitewater faculty reunion in 1885: “It was here that I first found myself,” he said. “It was not a great discovery to anyone else, but it was all-important to me.”
As someone who was only mildly interested in the history of his field, Hanger admits to being captivated by all of this local history. And it was all triggered by a 14-year-old rock collection.
“These specimens brought it all home to me,” he said. “Here’s a guy who had exactly the same job I have, teaching geology to 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds. And here I am using the same fossil specimens he collected.”
- Brian Mattmiller,npa@uww.edu
