Freiberg University of Mining and Technology, Freiberg, Saxony
In 1859 Pumpelly graduated from the Royal School of Mines in Freiburg, Germany.
Connections
Wife: Eliza Frances Shepard Pumpelly
1887
Eliza Frances Shepard Pumpelly (portrait by John Singer Sargent).
Son: Raphael Welles Pumpelly
Raphael II and Raphael Pumpelly
ancestor: William Pynchon
William Pynchon (October 11, 1590 – October 29, 1662) was an English colonist and fur trader in North America best known as the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts.
Raphael Pumpelly was an American geologist and explorer. He introduced the idea that the numerous lakes of the Canadian Shield are the result of the creation of basins due to the stripping of an irregular mantle of weathered rock by glacier erosion. He also organized the Northern Transcontinental Survey for the Northern Pacific Railroad.
Background
Ethnicity:
Pumpelly descended from Jean Pompilie, a French Huguenot emigrant to Canada.
Raphael Pumpelly was born on September 8, 1837, in Owego, New York, United States. He was descended from Jean Pompilie, a French Huguenot emigrant to Canada, through his son John who moved to Massachusetts about 1700. Later descendants migrated to Owego, Tioga County, where his parent William Pumpelly and his second wife, Mary H. (Welles) lived for a long time.
Education
Pumpelly attended common schools and graduated from Owego Academy, New York. Against his parent's objections, he decided against attending Yale University and chose to study and travel in Europe. A 1859 graduate of the Royal School of Mines in Freiburg, Germany, he traveled extensively through the mining districts of Europe to study geology and metallurgy by direct observation.
In 1856 Pumpelly left his mother in Florence and sailed for Corsica, returning four months later to find that she had received none of his brief notes and had given him up for dead.
Upon his return to America, a mining engineer, in 1859, he took charge of the development of silver mines in southern Arizona. Here he remained for more than a year, accomplishing the purpose he had undertaken and finally emerging with a whole skin at Los Angeles, California, in the fall of 1861. Proceeding thence to San Francisco, he found awaiting him an appointment as a geologist for the Japanese government, to explore the resources of the empire.
In company with William Phipps Blake, he sailed on November 23, 1861, reaching Japan on February 18, following. When his duties were brought to a close in 1863 by internal political disturbances of the empire, he was seized again by the spirit of wanderlust, and made an expedition up the Yangtze-kiang to study coal deposits, upon his return sailing for Tien-Tsin and Pekin, whence, in 1865, he journeyed overland through Tartary and Siberia to St. Petersburg. These travels bore fruit in his "Geological Researches in China, Mongolia, and Japan," published in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, and in Across America and Asia (1870).
The period following his homecoming was one of speculation in natural resources, and Pumpelly was soon engaged in an exploration of the copper and iron districts of Michigan and the Lake Superior district, becoming associated with Maj. Thomas Benton Brooks in the work upon which his reputation as a mining geologist chiefly rests. He contributed a report on "Copper-bearing Rocks" to Part II of Geological Survey of Michigan; Upper Peninsula, 1869-73 (1873).
During the winter of 1869, he lectured at Harvard on ore deposits. In 1870 he was again in Michigan in quest of iron, copper, and timberlands; in the autumn of 1871 he accepted the position of state geologist of Missouri, but in the winter of 1872-73 resigned on account of ill health, and settled in Balmville, near Newburgh, New York, where he busied himself in the preparation and study of thin sections of rocks in an effort to solve the problem of ore genesis.
In the autumn of 1875, he moved his family to Boston and accepted an appointment for the investigation of the mineral resources of the United States in connection with the Tenth Census. Becoming interested about this time in water pollution, he made important, though then not fully appreciated, investigations in connection with the Board of Health. In 1881, under the patronage of Henry Villard, he undertook a geological survey along the lines of a projected northwestern railway, a work brought to an untimely end through Villard's financial and nervous collapse. His "Geology of the Green Mountains in Massachusetts" was published in United States Geological Survey Monographs (1894). From 1895 to 1902 he was engaged from time to time in an advisory capacity in the Lake Superior region.
In 1903 and 1904, still restlessly active, although he had reached seventy, under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution of Washington he organized and conducted expeditions into Central Asia. Pumpelly contributed "Archaeological and Physico-Geographical Reconnaissance in Turkestan" to Explorations in Turkestan.
The later years of Pumpelly's life were spent at his home in Dublin, New Hampshire, and Newport, Rhode Island, and at Roseland, Georgia, where, beginning about 1883, his family and that of his friend Major Brooks lived for a time a delightful communistic life.
Raphael Pumpelly was considered to be a famous geologist, his first claim to immortality in geological history is based upon his studies of the loess of China and his "Relation of Secular Rock-Disintegration to Loess, Glacial Drift, and Rock Basins". His next most important work was in connection with the copper and iron ores of Michigan. He was the first to set forth clearly the secondary nature of the iron ores and establish their age. Equally important and suggestive was his work on the paragenesis of the copper deposits, as expounded in his "Metasomatic Development of the Copper-bearing Rocks of Lake Superior". Also, Pumpelly became a central figure in the growing summer colony of Dublin.
The mineral pumpellyite, first described in Keweenaw County in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, was named in his honor, as well as the Pumpelly Trail on Mount Monadnock is named after him. A house in New Hampshire on his former summer estate remains known as Pumpelly Studio.
Pumpelly was a member of the New Hampshire Society of the Sons of the Revolution. He was also a member and president of the Geological Society of America in 1905.
Geological Society of America
,
United States
Personality
Pumpelly was a man of taste and culture, thoroughly humane, and to the end of his life fond of the society of young people.
Quotes from others about the person
Pumpelly has been described by one of his biographers Keyes as "a great, blue-eyed giant, with long, flowing beard".
The famous publisher Henry Holt, a fast Dublin friend, described Pumpelly after his death, " He was incomparably the most influential person in the place - ruled it without knowing that he did - unconsciously attracted there all forms of excellence and unconsciously repelled any form of pettiness. The circle he drew around him blended the highest aristocracy with the simplest democracy. A visitor once described it to a stranger: "One night you'll go to as lovely a ball as you ever saw, and the next night you'll dine with people you met there who do their own work." That realization of Utopia those who shared and marveled at it knew was the involuntary work of Pumpelly. He loved all people worth loving and had no other standards, and all people worth loving loved him."
Connections
In 1869 Raphael Pumpelly settled in Cambridge, Massachussets, where on October 20 of that year he married Eliza Frances Shepard. Raphael and Eliza were the parents of five children. Their daughter, Elise Pumpelly, married Thomas Handasyd Cabot, the son of James Elliot Cabot and Elizabeth Dwight. He was the great-grandson of Thomas Handasyd Perkins; and a grand nephew of William Morris Hunt, an American painter.
Father:
William Pumpelly
1789–1889
Mother:
Mary H. (Welles)
Wife:
Eliza Frances Shepard Pumpelly
1840–1915
ancestor:
Jean Pompilie
Brother:
John Hollenbeck Pumpelly
1826–1907
Daughter:
Margarita Pumpelly Smyth
1873–1959
Daughter:
Elise Pumpelly Cabot
1875–1958
Son:
Raphael Welles Pumpelly
1881–1949
ancestor:
William Pynchon
October 11, 1590 – October 29, 1662, an English colonist and fur trader in North America best known as the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts. He was also a colonial treasurer, original patentee of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the iconoclastic author of the New World's first banned book. An original settler of Roxbury, Massachusetts, Pynchon became dissatisfied with that town's notoriously rocky soil and in 1635, led the initial settlement expedition to Springfield, Hampden County, Massachusetts, where he found exceptionally fertile soil and a fine spot for conducting trade. In 1636, he returned to officially purchase its land, then known as "Agawam."
