David Dale Owen

Owen worked between 1807 and 1860 across geologist, writer, painter and scientific collector. This article rests on 19 published texts and 45 scholarly references drawn from named institutional registers. Every statement below returns to a source shown in the evidence panel; where the record is silent or divided, the article says so instead of resolving it.

David Dale Owen was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, on 24 June 1807, to Ann (or Anne) Caroline Dale and Robert Owen. His mother was the daughter of David Dale, a wealthy Scottish textile manufacturer. His Welsh-born father, a part-owner and manager of the New Lanark Mills at New Lanark, Scotland, was a noted socialist reformer and philanthropist who established experimental utopian communities in the United States and the United Kingdom. David Dale, who was named for his maternal grandfather and called Dale, was the fourth son of the family's eight children; the eldest son died in infancy. His six surviving siblings (three brothers and three sisters) were Robert Dale, William, Ann (or Anne) Caroline, Jane Dale, Richard, and Mary. Owen grew up at Braxfield House, the Owen family's 40 acre estate in Lanarkshire. Like his brothers, Owen was privately tutored at home before he was sent as a teenager to Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg's school at Hofwyl, Switzerland. While attending the Swiss school for three years, Owen was exposed to Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi's method of education. He received a broad education, which included instruction in chemistry and natural history. David and his brother, Richard, returned to Scotland in 1826 and continued their education in science under Andrew Ure at the Andersonian Institute at Glasgow. In 1827, when Owen was about twenty years old, he sailed for America with his father, Robert, and two of his brothers, Robert Dale and Richard. After the party arrived in New York City in January 1828, David immediately went to New Harmony, Indiana, to live at the experimental socialistic community his father has established in 1825. Robert Owen returned to the United Kingdom, but his four surviving sons, David, Robert Dale, William, and Richard, along with their sister, Jane, became residents of the Owenite community at New Harmony and remained in Indiana, even after the social experiment failed in the late 1820s. Although he was frequently absent while pursuing his education and for his professional work, David Dale Owen established a permanent residence and a laboratory in New Harmony. In 1830 he spent a year painting and drawing in New York City, where his brother, Robert Dale Owen, was living at the time, and the next two years in London. Owen studied science at University of London, where he specialized in chemistry and geology, and returned to the United States in 1833. He began studying medicine at the Ohio Medical College in Cincinnati in 1835 and earned a medical degree from the college in 1837. Owen never established a medical practice. Instead, he returned to New Harmony, Indiana, in 1837 to begin his career as a natural scientist. In addition to his formal training in science and medicine, it is likely that Owen became interested in geology because of his father's business partnership with geologist William Maclure, a well-known educator and scientist who served as president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia from 1817 to 1840, and Gerhard Troost, a Dutch geologist, mineralogist, zoologist, and chemist. Both men arrived at New Harmony in 1825.

From 1837 to his death in 1860, Owen conducted geological surveys in the Midwestern United States, including the first geological surveys of Indiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota. Through this work he established himself as a leading authority on the region's geology. Owen became the first state geologist of three states: Kentucky (1854–57), Arkansas (1857–59), and Indiana (1837–39 and 1850–60). He also served as a federal geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. • Illustration — Illustration of Natural Steps, Arkansas

Owen's first geological work occurred in 1836 as an assistant mapping the geology of Tennessee with Gerald Troost, a friend from New Harmony. In 1837 the Indiana General Assembly commissioned Owen to conduct the first geological survey of the state. In March 1837 Indiana governor Noah Noble appointed him as the first state geologist of Indiana. For his geological services Owen earned a salary of $1,500 per year and a $250 expense allowance. During the first year of the survey, Owen traveled about a thousand miles on horseback to examine the state's geology, including its stone and coal resources. Owen submitted two reports of this initial survey to the state legislature. These early reports served as the basis for the research of other Indiana state geologists who succeeded him. In March 1838 Owen was reappointed for another year of survey research in the state.

In addition to his work in the field, Owen established a geological laboratory and museum at New Harmony. The laboratory served as the headquarters of the U.S. Geological Survey until 1856, when the federal survey's headquarters were relocated to the newly completed Smithsonian Institution Building in Washington, D.C. Over the years Owen amassed a personal collection of specimens at New Harmony that was "virtually unrivalled" west of the Allegheny Mountains. At the time of Owen's death in 1860, his museum at New Harmony included some 85,000 items. The collection included rocks, fossils, paleological specimens, minerals, and crystals, but most of these specimens have been lost or destroyed. His rivals, especially Joseph Granville Norwood, his colleague and one-time assistant, criticized Owen for enlarging his personal collection of specimens while working on public surveys. Walter B. Hendrickson, an Owen biographer, considers the criticism "unjustified" because Owen complied with the survey instructions he received and provided collections of specimens when he was asked to do so. Owen shipped eighteen boxes of specimens to Washington, D.C., where they became part collections of the Smithsonian Institution. However, by the mid-1940s, the identity of the collection that Owen donated to the national museum had been lost and could no longer be specifically attributed to him. Owen also provided specimens for a museum at Frankfort, Kentucky, and established a collections of specimens at Little Rock, Arkansas, but Hendrickson noted that "the best of the specimens found their way into the New Harmony museum." Due to the outbreak of American Civil War and for other reasons, author Clark Kimberling believes it is unlikely that the collections sent to Kentucky and Arkansas have survived. Some of Owen's specimens became part of the Gurley Collection at the University of Chicago and are housed at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. In 1869 the Owen family sold Owen's collection of specimens, called the "Owen Cabinet," to the State of Indiana. The natural collection was moved to a museum on a former site of the Indiana University campus in Bloomington. In July 1883 a fire destroyed IU's main building along with the museum that housed the Owen collection. About a thousand of the specimens were saved, but most of these were sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Twenty-two items from the collection were eventually housed in Owen Hall, an IU building erected in the 1880s at Dunn's Woods on the present-day campus in Bloomington.

David Dale Owen was born in 1807 in Lanarkshire. Owen held the nationality of United States. Married to: Caroline Charlotte Neef Owen. Recorded father: Robert Owen. Recorded mother: Anne Caroline Owen. Recorded sibling: Richard Owen and Robert Dale Owen. Owen died in 1860 in New Harmony. Owen is buried at Maple Hill Cemetery.