Background
Thomas Benton Brooks was born on June 19, 1836 at Monroe, New York, the son of John Brooks and Sarah Ketchum Brooks, his wife.
Thomas Benton Brooks was born on June 19, 1836 at Monroe, New York, the son of John Brooks and Sarah Ketchum Brooks, his wife.
His early training was limited to instruction at home, the district public schools, two years (1856 - 58) at the Union College School of Engineering, and in 1858-59 a single course of lectures under J. P. Lesley at the University of Pennsylvania.
He had, however, the happy faculty of learning from observation, and sufficiently mastered the use of the newly introduced plane table, while serving as an axman with the topographic branch of the Geological Survey of New Jersey, to supersede his immediate superior. This was when he was but seventeen years of age, and prior to his Union College training.
While in college Thomas Brooks made surveys in the mountain regions west of the Hudson and later worked with a Coast Survey party in the region of the Gulf of Mexico.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Brooks enlisted as a private, being then twenty-five years of age, and was mustered into service as first lieutenant, Company A, New York Volunteer Engineers, in September 1861, serving until the fall of 1864 and resigning only at the earnest request of his parents after the death of his brother in the trenches before Petersburg.
After his retirement from the army he served a year on the Geological Survey of New Jersey under Dr. G. H. Cook and in 1865 became vice-president and general manager of the Iron Cliff mine, near Negaunee in the Marquette District of Michigan. Here he began the geological work upon which his reputation is mainly based.
In 1869 he was employed, in recognition of his authority on the iron bearing formations, to take charge of the economic division of the state geological survey of the Upper Peninsula under Alexander Winchell. The difficulties encountered in this work are to-day little comprehended, except by those who have likewise worked in the region. The country was--at that time--heavily wooded and swampy. Outcrops were poor and often entirely lacking; prospect holes were few, and fewer yet were mines.
There were no maps other than the very defective and often misleading ones furnished by the Land Office. The geological structure was exceedingly complicated owing to repeated folding of the rocks. For use in his work Brooks designed the dial compass and adapted the dip needle to the purposes of the prospector. Determined to carry through his undertaking to a successful conclusion, notwithstanding the meagerness of the appropriation, he worked without salary and exhausted his vitality to an extent from which he never fully recovered.
Broken in health he went abroad and finished writing his report in 1873 while residing in London and Dresden.
This report was written with the intention of making it a manual of information as complete as possible, relating to the finding, extracting, transporting, and smelting of the iron ores of the Lake Superior region.
With this in view he presented first, an historical sketch of the discovery and development of the iron mines; second, the geology of the Upper Peninsula, including the lithology; third, the geology of the Marquette iron region; fourth, the geology of the Menominee iron region; fifth, the Lake Gogebic and Montreal River iron ridge; sixth, a chapter on exploration and prospecting for ore; and seventh, the magnetism of rocks and the use of the magnetic needle in exploring, concluding with chapters on the methods and cost of mining specular and magnetic ores and their chemical composition.
In 1876 he returned to the United States to reside for a winter at Monroe, thence moving to a suburb of Newburgh, New York, where he lived the life of a country gentleman.
Thomas Benton Brooks was focusing on the exploration of the Upper Peninsula region. Due to his pertinacity and originality Brooks succeeded in producing a work of value from a scientific standpoint as well as of the greatest use to the prospector and to those who came after him--a work indeed concerning which it has been said that it was only superseded after twenty years of study by an able corps of geologists with a hundredfold better facilities. In order to improve his work Brooks designed the dial compass and adapted the dip needle to the purposes of the prospector. Determined to carry through his undertaking to a successful conclusion, notwithstanding the meagerness of the appropriation, he worked without salary and exhausted his vitality to an extent from which he never fully recovered. With this in view he presented first, an historical sketch of the discovery and development of the iron mines; second, the geology of the Upper Peninsula, including the lithology; third, the geology of the Marquette iron region; fourth, the geology of the Menominee iron region; fifth, the Lake Gogebic and Montreal River iron ridge; sixth, a chapter on exploration and prospecting for ore; and seventh, the magnetism of rocks and the use of the magnetic needle in exploring, concluding with chapters on the methods and cost of mining specular and magnetic ores and their chemical composition. At the time of his resignation Brooks held the brevet rank of colonel.
Thomas Brooks won recognition for conspicuous bravery during the sieges of Forts Pulaski and Wagner and at the time of his resignation had risen to the rank of colonel by brevet.
Thomas Benton Brooks was twice married, first to Hannah Hulse, who died in 1883 and by whom he had five children, one of whom, Alfred Hulse Brooks, won distinction as a geologist, and second, in 1887, to Martha Giesler, a Prussian by birth.
In 1889 the Brooks family went abroad to obtain for his children the advantage of German educational facilities of which Brooks had a very high opinion.
geologist
In 1883, in company with a friend and business associate, Raphael Pumpelly, he purchased some eight and one-half square miles of land in Decatur County, Georgia.
geologist, explorer He was associated with Raphael Pumpelly.
