The Enigmatic Samuel Aughey: Nebraska’s Pastor Naturalist

Samuel Aughey at age 39 became the first Professor of Natural Science at the new University of Nebraska in Lincoln, serving from 1871 to 1883. He was an ordained pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, with an addendum degree from Pennsylvania College (now Gettysburg College) in 1856 and an A.M. degree two years later. His early pastoral work was in Pennsylvania, but in 1864 he became a home missionary to a church in Dakota City, Nebraska. Aughey’s career at the university was marked with successes and honors, but also criticism and questions about his basic knowledge of the sciences. While carrying a heavy teaching load at the university and the associated Latin school, Aughey volunteered his services to benefit the citizens of Nebraska, providing identifications of submitted items from plants to poisons. Aughey’s research subjects were expansive and included geology, paleontology, mineral resources, coal, entomology, flora, fauna, meteorology, geography, and soils. He worked to help control the devastating swarms of migratory locusts and sought to discover and document the state’s abundance of natural resources; but probably no one could usefully cover such a broad range of topics. Aughey left the university after he was accused of forging the co-signatures on personal loans. Although he was eventually cleared of the forgery charge, he resigned from the university and moved on to Wyoming where he became the Territorial Geologist. After a short stay in Wyoming, he had brief sojourns in Arkansas, Alabama, and Washington where he passed away in 1912. In order to better evaluate Aughey’s contributions to the natural history of Nebraska and the Great Plains, we have evaluated him in the tradition of the amateur American naturalist of the 1860s and 1870s. We hope to place him in the continuum of amateur naturalists or “popularizers” of science and the professional scientists who were beginning to graduate from American and European universities during this time. doi: 10.32873/unl.dc.zea.1512