It Happened Here -- Marker for a Mastodon!

North Mohawk St., Cohoes

In 1866 workers were digging down to bedrock, some 60 feet down, to build footings for the Harmony Company's new Mill #3 along the Mohawk River. The mill would soon be turning raw cotton into cloth, now that the Civil War was over and cotton would again be flowing north. The mill would be one of the largest of its kind in the world with 130,000 spindles on 2,700 looms. The building would contain 7 miles of gas and water pipes. But it would not be its size that would make Mill #3, soon to be known as the “Mastodon Mill”, famous. As the laborers approached the  bedrock of the ancient riverbed they discovered several large and deep potholes. Scientists would  speculate these were created, not by the existing river but by glacial streams dropping hundreds of feet from the top of melting glaciers to the bedrock, during one of several ice ages. In one of the pot holes buried beneath peat and sodden oak trees the workers were astonished to find a huge jaw bone with several large molars. In another pot hole some 60 feet away, a skull, leg bones, ribs and fragments of tusks were found. 

The massive Mill #3 built in 1866 was greatly enlarged in 1873

Cohoes Mastodon at the NYS Museum

From this point different scenarios could have developed. The bones might have been ignored and removed with the other trash in the potholes. The bigger bones might have been collected by the curious and ended up neglected souvenirs cast aside in someone's barn; the better preserved molars might have ended up as doorstops in one of the mill owner's houses. But developments in American society led to them receiving a better treatment.

Several developments in the middle of the 19^th Century contributed to the attention these

bones received. After two centuries of colleges and universities in America following the European tradition of devotion to the classics, the teaching of Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and the training of clergy,  by 1850 most American colleges and universities had begun to establish departments in the natural sciences, chemistry and geology. These departments were filled with bright young men eager to establish the legitimacy of their disciplines and increase the status of their departments at their respective schools.

Several states, New York among them, had started to hire state geologists to survey the geology of earth within their borders, in part for the sake of pure scientific inquiry, in part to better exploit the mineral wealth that might lie therein.

The exhibition of “natural science wonders” became extremely popular from the late 1820's onward. P.T. Barnum would become the most famous of these exhibitors. But there would be many other exhibitors and exhibitions.   Many larger cities had private exhibit halls, and even a large canal boat was outfitted as a traveling museum to tour the interior of New York on the Erie and other connecting canals. Numerous public museums came into being as well.

The American interest in what would become paleontology began with the European discovery of a trove of fossilized bones in an ancient salt spring near the Ohio River in Kentucky.  Known as “Big Bone Lick” by the native Shawnee Indians, it was “discovered” by French soldiers in 1739 who sent a sample of bones to their king to be displayed in his “cabinet du Roi” of natural curiosities. President Thomas Jefferson heard of the site and dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark at different times, both before and after their famous cross-continent expedition to collect specimens for him. In 1832, after a decade of collecting fossils, the property owner, Benjamin Finnell exhibited a collection of 300 bones and tusks from the “Lick” in New York City.  Professor Benjamin Silliman professor of geology at Yale College would report excitedly “ I cannot refrain from attempting to convey to others something of the impression made upon my own mind on entering the [exhibit] room containing this astounding assemblage of bones, many of which are gigantic in size.” Nathaniel Southgate Shorter, who worked for many years as the director of the Kentucky Geological Survey, studied the “Lick” and when he became a professor of Paleontology at Harvard had over a ton of fossils shipped from the “Lick” to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.

In Cohoes, the mill owners, to their credit, instructed the workers to collect any pieces of bone they encountered, and part of the floor of the mill office was set aside for that purpose. As the floor filled with bones, cleaned and oiled by the workers, the scene was “overrun” with curious townspeople and within days scientists from Union College and Yale were at the site. Professor O. C. Marsh of Yale College¹ spent most of the week inspecting the bones. He pronounced they were all from one animal and identified them as bones of a young, adult female American Mastodon. According to the Albany Argus of Nov. 12, 1866,  Marsh was “quite anxious to be allowed to take the bones with him.” The paper fretted that it would be a shame allow such an important piece of New York “geological history” to leave the state, “Let them at least go no farther off then to be deposited in State Geological rooms [in Albany.]” But the paper need not have worried. While the mill received offers from several public institutions to buy the bones and a plan was proposed to donate the proceeds to the Union Sunday School, James Hall, paleontologist and curator of the New York State Cabinet of Natural History came on the scene.  T.G. Younglove, of the Harmony Company had first written Hall, inviting him to come and see the “curious things” being taken out of the excavation site. Hall ignored the letter and did not respond until Younglove wrote him again about a large jawbone being found, and probably Hall began reading newspaper reports of the finds.

James Hall has been described as “headstrong, single-minded and a tenacious advocate of science and accuracy”. In his 63 years as first, a geologist for the State Geological Survey, then curator of the State Cabinet, then director of the New York State Museum of Natural History, Hall was a ferocious defender of his scientific theories, his projects and the programs he headed.

Several incidents illustrate the remarkable lengths to which Hall was willing to go to accomplish his ends. In 1849 a schoolteacher, James T. Foster, from Greenbush, a town across the river from Albany, promoted a geological chart for use in the public schools that Hall felt was vague and filled with errors. After trying various channels to block the adoption of this chart, including lawsuits, Hall heard an entire production run of these charts was being printed for use in the New York City schools. Hearing they were being shipped on a certain night from Albany via the Hudson River Night Line Hall booked passage for that trip. Dr. Hall arrived safely the next morning in New York City, but “mysteriously”, the charts did not. Someone had dumped the whole edition of the charts overboard, during the night!

About the same time, James Hall became involved in a bitter dispute with his former teacher Ebenezer Emmons. Both he and Emmons studied the geological formation of the Taconic mountains. Emmons produced a series of papers and maps that traced the origins of the mountains back to the early Pre-Cambrian era, contradicting Hall's research conclusion that they dated from the later Ordovician era. Hall took Emmons works as a personal attack against him and brought a suit against his former mentor. In a court of Law the two scientists squared off against one another, each presenting their hypothesis and conclusions. The charismatic Hall backed by an entourage of supporters, not only received a favorable judgment but the court banned the unfortunate Dr. Emmons from ever practicing geology in the State of New York! -- undoubtedly the first, and probably only judgment of geological malpractice! (Ironically, less than a dozen years later fossils were discovered that proved Dr. Emmons was correct.)

When James Hall, geologist became James Hall, curator, and then James Hall, museum director, he carried the same traits of zealous tenacity and flair with him. His annual presentations before the state legislature became legendary, with the good doctor making impassioned pleas for funds, stomping about, slamming his cane on senator's or assemblymen's desks and even waving it in their faces.

Not surprisingly, Hall would go to tremendous lengths to acquire rock and fossil collections he wanted. If a collection could not be bought outright, Hall would sometimes make irresistibly generous offers to the collection's owners to come to Albany to study their collections under him, paying them handsomely as assistants or apprentices. Eventually these assistants/apprentices would move on – but the collections would stay in Albany !

The discovery of the Cohoes mastodon could not have come at a more fortuitous time for James Hall. By 1857, as the state geologist, Hall had increased the state's collection of geological samples and fossils so greatly that a new laboratory had to be built to house them.

Hall's Laboratory (now the Sunshine School), Lincoln Park

 In January 1865 he was appointed curator of the state's collection of geological and “natural history” specimens known as the State Cabinet. At this time he made a compelling argument for the establishment of a public museum for the display of geological and natural science exhibits and was charged with developing a plan to create the State Museum. Preparations for the new museum were well underway when the mastodon was discovered. Hall was well aware of the value of public support for his museum. He doubtlessly realized that any collection New York State invertebrate fossils, of no matter how complete and well displayed they were. would not generate a tenth the interest that a fossilized skeleton of a mastodon, fully reassembled and articulated would generate.

When Dr. Hall realized what was being dug up, virtually in his backyard, he rushed to the scene. Within days, Professor Marsh was on his way back to Yale, without the bones he so much desired. Offers to purchase the mastodon and the plans to donate the proceeds to the Union Sunday School were swept aside, and a plan for Harmony Mills to donate it to the State Cabinet was in place. In return for this gift, Alfred Wild, president of Harmony Company would receive from the legislature a “joint resolution of thanks.” And Hall would secure $2000 (roughly the equivalent of $22,000 today) to complete the final excavation and the preservation and mounting of the skeleton.

Within a month plans were being made to reassemble the bones, making plaster-of-paris substitutes for missing bones copied from other mastodon skeletons in collections around the country. At a National Academy of Science conference at Hartford, James Hall read a major paper detailing the investigations of the mastodon and the river bottom in which it was found.

 The next year the restored skeleton was placed in the State Cabinet of Natural History in Albany, which eventually became the nucleus of the State Education Department Museum in 1913.

State Ed Building, Washington Ave. Albany

A NYSHM stood here advertising the state Museum and Library

So while the Cohoes Mastodon marker marks the location of a prehistoric fossil find, it also, in a sense, marks an event  in the beginnings of the scientific field of paleontology.

Marker of the Week -- Perhaps half a dozen NYSHMs have primarily a geological instead of an historical subject matter.  One of these is the "Helderbergs" marker in Thatcher Park.

On Rte NYS 85A in Thatcher Park

 

1

That very year, Othniel Charles Marsh, born in Lockport New York, had become a professor of vertebrate paleontology at Yale University. Marsh would persuade a wealthy uncle, Charles Peabody into funding Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History and the Yale Paleontologist would become a towering figure in 19^th century paleontology. Over the next two decades, Marsh would scour the American west, discover and name eighty species of Jurassic and Cretaceous period animals. The Brontosaurus (later named Apatosaurus), Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Triceratops were but a few of the giant dinosaur genera discovered and named by him.