DAVID DALE OWEN: ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN GEOLOGIST

David Dale Owen (1807-1860) was born in Scotland and educated in Scotland and Switzerland, but made New Harmony, Indiana, his home and base of operations throughout his adult life. Continuing his education in the 1830s, Owen studied in London, earned a medical degree from Ohio Medical College in Cincinnati, and served as a survey assistant to Gerard Troost on the Tennessee state survey. In 1837, Owen was appointed head of the newly created Indiana State Geological Survey. In the next two decades, he would head two federal surveys, the Kentucky state survey, the Arkansas state survey, and the second incarnation of the Indiana state survey.

Owen's career exemplifies the patterns of education, apprenticeship, survey employment, and scientific publication characteristic of antebellum American geologists. But Owen was also an exception, working from the metaphorical ashes of the utopian community of New Harmony, obtaining what was sometimes seen as more than his fair share of survey work, and completing that work with amazing speed and efficiency. He was an immigrant in an increasingly native-born scientific community, and a westerner in a scientific community periodically divided by regional jealousies. Perhaps most importantly, Owen mastered the quintessential challenge of doing science in the American context: how to produce utilitarian results, on time and within budget while generating and disseminating new scientific knowledge as well.