Background
Maclure was born on October 27, 1763, in Ayr, Scotland, the son of David McClure and Ann Kennedy. Apparently, he was baptized James, but later called himself William and changed the spelling of his family name.
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cartographer geologist philanthropist scientist
Maclure was born on October 27, 1763, in Ayr, Scotland, the son of David McClure and Ann Kennedy. Apparently, he was baptized James, but later called himself William and changed the spelling of his family name.
Maclure received his elementary education at Ayr, under the tutelage of a Mr. Douglass, an intelligent teacher, who was especially reputed for classical and mathematical attainments.
Maclure entered a mercantile house, and at nineteen made his first visit to the United States, to transact some business in New York. Upon his return to Great Britain, he became a partner in the London firm of Miller, Hart & Company. He was eminently successful in business, quickly acquiring a fortune which enabled him to retire and devote his life to science and philanthropy.
In 1796, he again paid a visit to America. He was appointed a member of a commission to settle spoliation claims between his adopted country and France, a task which engaged him for several years. In 1807, he published To the People of the United States: A Statement of the Transactions of the Board of Commissioners Appointed in 1803 for the Adjustment of Claims against the French Government.
Returning to America, he entered upon the task of making a geological map of the United States, the first map of its scope in the history of geology. The greater part of the country was at this time a wilderness; nevertheless, Maclure went forth, for the most part alone and always at his own expense, making observations throughout the entire region east of the Mississippi River.
The American Philosophical Society published his colored geological map, with the explanatory "Observations on the Geology of the United States," in Volume I of its Transactions. The production was one with which any worker might have been content to rest. Instead, Maclure set about a revision almost at once, completing it in 1817. Published with an accompanying volume, Observations on the Geology of the United States (1817), it appeared also in 1818 in Volume I, new series, of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society.
During the winter of 1816-17, with C. A. LeSueur as a companion, he visited the West Indies, directing his studies particularly to volcanic phases of their geology, and in the Journal of the Academy for November 1817 published his observations. Another phase of Maclure's activity related to education. In 1805, while in Switzerland, he had visited Pestalozzi's school at Yverdun, and, enthusiastic over what he saw there, had persuaded Joseph Neef to come to America to introduce Pestalozzian methods.
In 1819, he went to Spain in the hope of establishing a great agricultural school for the common people, in which labor should be combined with instruction. He had purchased some 10, 000 acres of land near Alicante and fitted up the necessary buildings when the liberal government of the Cortes was overthrown by revolution, the land was restored to the Church from which it had been confiscated, and he was obliged to relinquish his plan with a complete loss of all the property.
This misfortune did not discourage him permanently, however, and after a visit in 1824 to Robert Owen's school at New Lanark, Scotland, he became interested in Owen's projected community at New Harmony, Indiana. In his usual wholehearted manner, he purchased an extensive tract of land in the vicinity and forwarded his library, instruments, and other personal effects that might be useful in carrying out once more, in new territory, his plan for an agricultural school.
He succeeded in persuading a number of other scientific men to accompany him to New Harmony, and when he set out, took with him down Ohio the "boat-load of knowledge," which included LeSueur, Gerard Troost, and Thomas Say. Even after the failure of Owen's venture Maclure persisted in an attempt to organize societies for adult education among the working classes.
He founded the New Harmony Working Men's Institute in 1838, and by his will directed his executors to pay $500 to any club of laborers which should establish a library of 100 volumes. The breakdown of his health led him to spend the winter of 1827-28 in Mexico, with his friend Say. That country, he came to believe, offered a more hopeful field for the realization of the projects near to his heart.
Accordingly, after visiting Philadelphia and presiding in November 1828 at the New Haven meeting of the American Geological Society, of which he had been president for several years, he returned to Mexico, in the hope of aiding in the educational uplift of its people.
He planned to bring back with him "a considerable number of aboriginal young men" to be trained in his school at New Harmony to "a knowledge of useful arts and the habits that may fit them both to rule and to obey, in a republican government," but apparently the design was never carried out.
Maclure spent most of the rest of his life in Mexico. Upon the serious failure of his health in 1839, he made an attempt to return to the United States, but was unable to stand the difficulties of the journey and died in the village of San Angel, near the city of Mexico, early in 1840.
During his residence in Mexico, he had continued to correspond with his scientific friends and contributed a number of letters on political, social, and economic topics to the New Harmony Disseminator. These papers were collected and published under the title, Opinions on Various Subjects, Dedicated to the Industrious Producers.
Quotations: "In all speculations on the origin, or agents that have produced the changes on this globe, it is probable that we ought to keep within the boundaries of the probable effects resulting from the regular operations of the great laws of nature which our experience and observation have brought within the sphere of our knowledge. When we overleap those limits and suppose a total change in nature's laws, we embark on the sea of uncertainty, where one conjecture is perhaps as probable as another; for none of them can have any support, or derive any authority from the practical facts wherewith our experience has brought us acquainted."
From boyhood, the United States "had been to Maclure the land of promise," and at this time he may have taken the first steps toward naturalization. In 1803, Maclure become a citizen of the United States. During 1800s in Europe he traveled extensively, studying geology and natural history of the continent and collecting specimens.
Maclure was heartily interested in the welfare of the Academy and presented to it at different times the greater part of his valuable library, as well as several of his collections of specimens. He supervised the publication of the first volumes of its Journal, and by a series of gifts, totaling some $20, 000, made possible the erection of a building for its permanent housing.
He is described as a man of "above the middle stature and of a naturally robust frame," of conspicuous serenity of mind, singularly mild and unostentatious in manner.
Maclure never married.