Israel Charles White, son of Michael and Mary (Russell) White, was born in Monongalia County, Va. (later W. Va. ). His first paternal American ancestor was one Stephen White who emigrated from England about 1659 and is said to have settled in Baltimore County, Md.
White was educated in the public schools of his native town and at West Virginia University, from which he was graduated in 1872. Soon after, he entered upon a graduate course in geology at Columbia University but abandoned it in 1877.
He was the chair of geology at West Virginia University. He held this position until 1892, devoting his vacations for some years to field work for the state survey in the coal and oil fields of Pennsylvania. In 1892 he entered private business, and in 1897 was appointed superintendent of the newly organized geological survey of West Virginia, for the establishment of which he had been largely responsible. This position he continued to hold during the remaining thirty years of his life, refusing after the first two years to accept a salary. From 1884 to 1888 he served also as assistant geologist on the United States Geological Survey and prepared a report on the "Stratigraphy of the Bituminous Coal Field of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, " which was published as Bulletin 65 (1891) of that organization. This is said to have been the foundation for nearly all subsequent work in the bituminous fields of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. As head of the West Virginia survey, White supervised the preparation of a complete set of topographic maps, covering the entire state, as well as thirty-four geological reports, of which he himself wrote two on oil and three on coal. These reports were largely of an economic nature, but full of detailed stratigraphy. White's early work in Pennsylvania was accurate and painstaking in the extreme. In doing it he laid, unconsciously perhaps, the foundation for his future discoveries. His most important work, upon which his reputation largely depends and which put him foremost among the petroleum geologists of the world, was his "anticlinal theory" of oil and gas, formulated about 1883. Pointing out that all large gas wells in Pennsylvania and West Virginia were situated either directly on or near the crowns of anticlinal axes, he drew the conclusion that a direct relation existed between gas territory and the disturbance in the rocks caused by their upheaval into arches. Gifted with shrewd business sense, White made large investments in "wildcat" leases, and thereby not merely proved his theory but gained a substantial competence. In 1904-06 he served as chief geologist of the Brazilian Coal Commission, making a first-hand official report on the coal fields of the southern part of the republic, which was published in both Portuguese and English. At the White House conference in May 1908, he delivered an address on "The Waste of Our Fuel Resources, " which had much to do with the subsequent conservation movement. He was president of the West Virginia and Morgantown Board of Trade, director and president of the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank, president of the Morgantown Brick Company, and connected with other business organizations. Public-spirited to an eminent degree and active in civic affairs, he was actively concerned with the Monongalia county hospital and the tuberculosis sanitarium, giving his time as well as funds. One of his largest single contributions was the gift of 1, 900 acres of coal lands to the city of Morgantown and West Virginia University. He was one of the founders of the Geological Society of America, its treasurer (1892 - 1906), and its president in 1920. He died at the Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore of a cerebral hemorrhage after an apparently successful operation.
He was a genial, kindly man, modest and unassuming. His standard of honor was high, and, though he was himself a commercial man, he would never throughout his long career as superintendent of the survey allow himself to be drawn into expert private work within the limits of his own state lest it bring criticism upon his organization.
He was married three times: first on July 27, 1872, to Emily McClane Shane of Morgantown, W. Va. , who died in 1874, leaving one child; second on December 4, 1878, to Mary Moorhead, by whom he had five children; third on Feburary 12, 1925, to Mrs. Julia Posten Wildman, who survived him.
