It Happened Here -- Winifred Goldring, Paleontologist

New York City had been growing rapidly throughout the nineteenth century and with its growth came a growing thirst for safe fresh drinking water. The City and the State Legislature looked north to the streams and valleys of the Catskill mountains. In 1905 the legislature enacted a proposal for the damming of the Esopus and Schoharie Creeks to create reservoirs and a system of aqueducts to conduct water to the City. On the Schoharie, the gorge at Gilboa was selected for a reservoir site with the dam running right through the village of Gilboa, requiring that the whole town be razed. Three churches, two boarding houses, many stores, business and homes – some 430 structures were torn down or burned. Seven cemeteries and family burial plots were relocated. In 1917 land acquisitions began and by 1920 excavations for the dam commenced.

           GILBOA SETTLEMENT
       COTTON MILL 1840-1869, TANNERY             
       CHURCH & CEMETERY STOOD ON              NYSHM at Schoharie Dam (now obscured by dam reconstruction)
   GROUND NOW COVERED BY RESERVOIR
     OF NEW YORK CITY WATER SUPPLY
                  STATE EDUCATION
                     DEPT. 1949

As the steam shovels began their work to dig footings, and as crews began blasting out rock from creek-side quarries for the dam, workers began to discover fossil tree stumps.

Some seventy years before, Samuel Lockwood, a local pastor and amateur naturalist had first discovered pieces of fossilized tree trunks, and foliage as well as some distinctive bulbous tree stumps in a quarry along the Schoharie Creek. They had been identified as a species of fern-trees from the Devonian age. They had been located at the edge of a shallow inland sea and buried in a slurry of storm-borne sand.

The New York State Museum was called and a team was rapidly assembled to rescue any significant fossils that emerged before they were covered by the construction of the dam or the waters of the reservoir. Beyond the team's important discoveries, the State Museum's project was significant for other reasons as well. First, it was one of the earliest “salvage paleontology projects” and secondly it was one of the first major paleontology projects headed by a woman.

Winifred Goldring was an extremely bright young woman, graduating from Albany's Milne School as class valedictorian in 1905 and graduating with honors from Wellesley College four years later. She began her college years focusing on classical languages but two required “science” courses (geology and “geography”) set her on a totally different path. As a girl she had collected fossils in the Helderberg Mountains; and her father must have sparked in her an early interest in botany. Frederick Goldering was trained as a master gardener at Kew gardens in Great Britain, and had come to America to manage the exotic orchid collection of Erastus Corning¹ a wealthy businessman and politician in Albany. Later Goldring ran a successful florist/greenhouse business from his home in Slingerlands, N.Y. In 1912 Winifred earned her AM degree at Wellesley and took additional courses in geography, paleontology and paleobotany at Harvard, Colombia and John Hopkins University.

In 1914 she was hired by John Mason Clarke, the New York State Museum's third director as a “Special Temporary Expert in Paleontology” to create fossil invertebrate exhibits for the State Museum. Hired to “fill the cases” she worked, instead on creating interpretive exhibits that would educate the public, beginning with exhibits entitled “What is a Fossil?” and “What is a Formation?”

She would go on to create full-sized dioramas that would depict a Devonian Forest and the pot hole deposition site of the Cohoes mastodon bones. Eventually her museum work would lead her into science publications for the general public. The Handbook of Paleontology for Beginners and Amateurs, first published in 1933 went through several publications and was widely used as a college introductory text. The Guide to the Geology of John Boyd Thatcher Park was also published in 1933, and was republished in 1997!

In 1915 she was hired as an assistant paleontologist. Clarke had begun an ambitious review of the literature and of the State's extensive collections of both catalogued and as yet un-studied fossil crinoids (sea lilies), but the project had languished as Clarke was occupied with other museum business. In 1916 he asked Winifred to take over the study. Early on he had been impressed by her scholarship and work ethic, praising her as a “particularly hardy seeker after the truth.” After seven years of comprehensive study she published a 670 page monograph that systematized the ancient crinoids into twenty five families, sixty genera and one hundred and fifty five species, firmly establishing her reputation as a first rank paleontologist.

When fossils began emerging from the excavations and quarry sites at Gilboa in 1920, Clarke and his team began collecting. But again, the press of business at the museum prevented him from devoting adequate attention to overseeing the project. In 1921 he turned over the Gilboa fossil project to Winifred Goldring and her colleague Rudolf Reudemann.

 They would work the site until 1926 when rising reservoir waters would prevent further work. In 1924 Goldring published a synopsis of their work to date at Gilboa in the New York State Museum Bulletin #251. Over forty tree stumps had been found from three successive forests, each having been buried by storm driven sands. In the same layers, but not attached to the stumps were found considerable amounts of fossilized vegetative matter – (apparently) seeds, spore cases,branches and palm-like fronds. 



Based on this evidence Goldring concluded the stumps were a new genus of “seed ferns” she named Eospermatoperis (ie. “dawn of the seed fern”). This designation would stand for eight decades. The publication of this report and subsequent journal articles would make Gilboa and Winifred Goldring world famous.²

Though Goldring had the support and respect of most of her colleagues at the State Museum, many people, including some of her co-workers were uncomfortable with a young single woman doing geological field work, and wished she would confine her work to the laboratory and the museum. Though she participated regularly in professional meetings and conferences, she was rarely invited on collecting expeditions out of state and colleagues mentioned in letters the “limitations of taking women into the field.” To many it simply didn't seem proper for a woman to be seen clambering around rocky outcroppings or picking through shattered bedrock at a quarry or examining the latest discovery at the bottom of a hole at a construction site while construction workers stood around watching. Certainly the fashions of the first decades of the twentieth century were not conducive to such activities, as the voluminous ankle length skirts of the first decade gave way to the pencil thin dresses of the second decade. It would be another twenty or twenty-five years before women commonly wore pants, but Miss Goldring was not to be thwarted. She created her own outfit with bloomers for fieldwork. When other critics and concerned friends raised the issue of her personal safety when working alone un-escorted in the field, around quarries and construction sites, she answered them by learning to shoot a revolver, implying she would work armed, if she was ever working alone and felt threatened.

Perhaps more troubling for Winifred were issues of fair compensation and opportunities for advancement, as a woman. In 1918 she resigned briefly over issues of inadequate salary combined with the pressures of completing her exhibit work and working on the crinoid project. In 1928 she considered applying for a position with the U.S. Geological Survey but was dissuaded by colleagues who alerted her that the survey directors were looking for a “he-man” paleobotanist. The following year in a letter she discussed the issue of whether a woman should go into the fields of geology and paleontology. She pointed out that her salary of $2,300 was half that of the (male) clerks and stenographers at the museum. Generally she encouraged girls to go into other fields – botany and zoology instead of paleontology. Her promotions came slowly but steadily as her dedication to her profession and the quality of her work could not be denied. From 1920 to 1938 she worked as an Associate Paleontologist, during which for three years she held the title of Paleo-botanist. From 1938 to 1939 she was the provisional State Paleontologist until she became State Paleontologist in 1939, the first woman to hold such a position in the United States, and the highest ranked woman in her profession in the world. In 1949 she became the first women elected president of the Paleontological Society and the following year, vice president of the Geological Society of America.

In the 1930's Miss Goldring turned her attention to an unusual rock formation a few miles west of Saratoga Springs. Discover in 1825, by J. H. Steele, he described the site as having “great quantities calcareous concretions...mostly hemispherical. But many are globular and vary in size from half an inch to two feet in diameter; they are obviously composed of a series of successive layers nearly parallel and perfectly concentric; these layers have a compact texture, and are dark blue or near black in colour, and are united by layers of lighter coloured calcareous substance....they are very thin and I have counted more than a hundred [layers] in one series.” The advancing glaciers had sheared off their upper portions leaving them looking something like cabbages, halved and ready to be grated.

Lester Park Rd, south of Co. Rte 21, Saratoga

But what were these things? Both Steele and William Mather, a geologist reporting for the Geographic survey of 1843 he felt they were inorganic concretions. In 1883 James Hall examined the area and discovered within the fossils minute branching “canaliculi”. He named them Cryptozoon proliferium (ie. Prolific hidden life). In 1906 H.M. Seeley confirmed they were organisms but classified them with the sponges. In 1916 G. R. Wieland first advanced arguments that they belonged to a group of algae.

Robert Ritchie, an amateur geologist bought the property that contained much of the outcroppings. Uncovering much more of the area, he opened it to the public as a park, Petrified Sea Gardens, in 1924.  New York State acquired the rest, which became Lester State Park.

In the 1930's Winifred Goldring joined the fray, and with characteristic thoroughness studied the area, for several years. In a 70 page report she concluded they were actually three reefs of ancient algae, each dominated by a different species: Cryptozoon proliferium, C. ruedemanni, or C. undulatum. She described the environmental conditions that favored one or another species. Goldrings conclusions would be supported by studies in recent times by the discovery of living stromatolites found in reefs in Australia and other places.
 

Miss Goldring died in 1971. Her career spanned over 40 years and was marked by significant professional achievements as she rose to the top of her profession, in the face of sustained gender discrimination. While her accomplishments are highlighted in a kiosk type display near the Gilboa Museum which features several of Gilboa tree fossils of the type she discovered and described, she is not mentioned at the Lester Park site. In 1998 Governor George Pataki's administration promoted a series of New York State Historical Markers spotlighting the achievements of Women in New York State.3 Unfortunately she was not among those chosen. Hopefully in the future she will be considered for a Marker, perhaps at the site of her home in Slingerlands.

Marker of the Week -- You have to Wonder,


given the (ah) shall we say, spontaneous habits of cattle if you spend any time marching them back and forth over clay won't they tend to make their own  "contributions" to the clay? Well, of course the bricks were fired....and maybe a little additional organic matter made them stronger.

At any rate, the good Doctor ended up with a handsome house.

                    Buckwheat Bridge Rd., North of Clermont

1Erastus Corning was the grandfather of Erastus Corning III who held office as Albany's mayor for 43 years.

2In 1935 German scientists would call into question the classification of these trees as “seed fern” but it would not be until 2004 that paleontologists would find at Gilboa two complete Eospermatoperii with their trunks and foliage intact. Their announcement of their discovery in 2007 would begin a process of reclassification that continues to this day.

3 Recent posts on this blog have featured Alida Livingston and Amelia Bloomer