Establishment and early development of the Mississippi Geological Survey, USA

Admitted as the twentieth US state in 1817, Mississippi received authorization for a state geological survey on 5 March 1850. The survey’s first decade was marked by geologically illiterate directors, but competent assistants assured quality work. John Millington (1779–1868), the first state geologist, assigned fieldwork to his assistant, Oscar Lieber (1830–1862), who resigned shortly after Millington’s 1852 report. Leiber published Mississippi’s first geological map in 1854. The next assistant, Benjamin L.C. Wailes (1797–1862), investigated geology’s influences on Mississippi’s agriculture. Wailes left the survey when he was not promoted and Lewis Harper was named state geologist. Harper struggled with university administration, and the survey was moved to the penitentiary under his tenure. Eugene Hilgard (1833–1916) became the next assistant geologist, but with multiple errors in Harper’s 1857 report, the legislature proposed to abolish the survey. The survey was suspended briefly with Harper’s resignation, but Hilgard returned in early 1858 to become Mississippi’s first competent state geologist. Although the American Civil War (1861–1865) disrupted the publication of Hilgard’s report, his 1860 two-part Report on the Geology and Agriculture of the State of Mississippi eventually became the definitive text on Mississippi’s geology for the next half century.