FROM ACQUISITION TO ACCESS: THE WISCONSIN GEOLOGICAL SURVEY AND THE LAKE SUPERIOR LEGACY COLLECTION, 1882-1905 AND 2012-2017

Roland D. Irving arrived at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1870 from the Columbia University School of Mines and was soon after working on a four-volume geological survey of his new state with T.C. Chamberlin, published in the 1870s. A few years later, Irving petitioned the USGS director, J.W. Powell, for an integrated investigation into the Precambrian rocks of the Lake Superior region, and in 1882, the Lake Superior Division (LSD) of the USGS, with Irving at its head, began a detailed survey of the Lake Superior area during which Irving pioneered the application of microscopic petrography (thin sections). After Irving’s untimely death in 1888, the Division’s fieldwork continued under subsequent directors C.R. Van Hise and C.K. Leith. Though the LSD was officially disbanded in 1905, Division geologists carried out intermittent work for almost another 20 years.

Mineral exploration was the primary driver for the Survey, and the Lake Superior Division’s work was concentrated in the copper- and iron-rich Marquette region of Michigan, the Menominee and Gogebic regions of Michigan and Wisconsin, the Lake Vermilion and Mesabi regions of Minnesota, and the Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury regions of Ontario. Division publications include nine monographs, four bulletins, and a professional paper.

The existing raw materials generated during these investigations form the Lake Superior Legacy Collection: about 460 field notebooks, 10,500 hand samples, 15,700 thin sections, and sixty hand-drawn maps. Over the course of five years, WGNHS staff, with the support of the USGS National Geological and Geophysical Data Preservation Program, inventoried, cataloged, and integrated the collection, capturing locational metadata for each sample and connecting the samples to the paper documents. In 2017, the collection went online in an interactive GIS application that provides point locations for samples in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, with links to scanned field notes.