Background
He was born on June 29, 1804 in Little Compton, Rhode Island, United States, the son of Rev. Mase and Deborah (Haskins) Shepard, and a descendant of Thomas Shepard, who was living in Malden, Massachussets, before 1658.
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He was born on June 29, 1804 in Little Compton, Rhode Island, United States, the son of Rev. Mase and Deborah (Haskins) Shepard, and a descendant of Thomas Shepard, who was living in Malden, Massachussets, before 1658.
Most of his early education was received in the schools of Providence. In 1820 he entered Brown University but at the end of the freshman year left that institution to join the group which made up the original student body of Amherst College. At the latter college he found disappointingly little science but came under Amos Eaton, a distinguished botanist and geologist of that period. He graduated from Amherst in 1824. In 1825 he began to study under Thomas Nuttall, a botanist and mineralogist.
Shepard was primarily a mineralogist and his collection, or cabinet as he terms it, was the interest which determined much of his life. He began to collect minerals when he was fifteen years old, and carried his collection first to Brown University and then to Amherst. Shepard at once began making excursions to the various mineral localities, and found the tourmalines at Chester and Goshen. Eaton used Shepard's collection to illustrate his lectures, for the college had none of its own at that time. With these minerals, while still a student, Shepard began making exchanges, dealing with the Imperial Museum at Vienna and other institutions.
In 1825 he accepted the position of teacher of natural science in the Boston schools. During the three years Shepard lived in Boston he collected in nearby places and one summer made a most profitable trip to Maine, where he discovered that the locality around Paris furnished the finest pink and green tourmalines then known.
In this period, also, he began writing articles for the American Journal of Science and Arts, and through these he became acquainted with its editor, Benjamin Silliman. In 1827 he became Silliman's assistant at New Haven, and in 1830-31 was a lecturer in botany at Yale. The next two years he was in charge of the Brewster Scientific Institute, New Haven, and in 1833 was appointed lecturer in natural history at Yale, which position he held until 1847. As Silliman's assistant he engaged in an investigation of the sugar industry for the Southern states, work which led to his appointment, in 1834, as professor of chemistry in the South Carolina Medical College. Since his duties there required but part of his time, he continued his lectures at Yale and in 1835 assisted in making the Connecticut geological survey.
In 1839 he began a long series of trips to Europe for making exchanges. Accepting a call to be lecturer in natural history at Amherst under Edward Hitchcock in 1844, he made an arrangement with the college for housing his collection in a fireproof building and its eventual purchase. Accordingly, such a building having been provided, in 1847 his specimens were moved to Amherst and his Yale lectureship terminated.
During the Civil War he resigned his professorship at South Carolina Medical College, but was called back at the end of the war, serving until 1869, when he was succeeded by his son.
He also wrote a textbook, Treatise on Mineralogy (1832), a second part to which appeared in 1835.
In 1877 he retired from teaching at Amherst and the college purchased his collection as agreed, though he continued to collect until his death in 1886.
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He was a member of many learned societies, among them the Imperial Society of Natural Science in St. Petersburg, the Royal Society of Gottingen, and the Society of Natural Science of Vienna.
His scholarship was everywhere recognized, and while his methods of teaching were far from conventional, his enthusiasm and kindliness attracted many students.
On September 23, 1831, he was married to Harriet, daughter of Robert Taylor of New Braintree, Massachussets; they had three children.