Oakland Geology

Longtime readers will recall my post about Joseph Le Conte’s gravestone, which begins, “Joseph Le Conte (1823–1901) is probably the most eminent geologist in Mountain View Cemetery.” Last week I looked into that statement in more detail. Having made a thorough study — well, fairly thorough — actually pretty cursory, given the difficulties, I can say that Prof. Le Conte is probably not the most eminent geologist buried here. It’s arguable.

Here are all the other geologists I’ve been able to find, in the order of their deaths.

Ezra Slocum Carr (1819-1894) lies in plot 4, in an unmarked grave next to his wife Jeanne Smith Carr (1825-1903).

Ezra is significant in American geology for being part of the 1857 geological survey of Wisconsin, along with James Hall and Josiah Whitney. Ezra was a professor of natural history at the University of Wisconsin when Jeanne met a remarkable young man named John Muir. Together, the Carrs — no other word for it — cultivated him and maintained with him an intimate lifelong connection. Ezra gave Muir his first instruction in geology, something the Scottish-born farmboy must have soaked up like a sponge. When Ezra accepted an appointment to the new University of California in 1869, he became its first professor of agriculture. Muir had already come to California and been smitten with the Yosemite country. Jeanne arranged for Muir to meet Louisa Strenzel, daughter of a wealthy Martinez doctor and orchardist, who became Muir’s wife in 1880. Ezra later became the state Superintendent of Public Instruction.

James Graham Cooper (1830-1902) lies in plot 31, lot 15 right across from the prominent knocker. I haven’t found his stone yet, if there is one.

Cooper was a restless guy, trained as a doctor as so many early American naturalists were. His interests included botany, zoology and fossils, and he made many contributions to paleontology. He served in several Western exploring expeditions, most notably Josiah Whitney’s geological survey of California. He lost out to Joseph Le Conte as first professor of natural history at UC Berkeley, but still crammed a lot of accomplishment into his lifespan.

The remains of John C. Merriam (1869-1945) are in the columbarium, which is hard to navigate so I haven’t visited his niche yet. Instead here’s a fine, unengraved boulder of Franciscan chert in the middle of a plot.

If you’ve heard of California’s tar pits — the major ones in Rancho La Brea in Los Angeles and near McKittrick in the San Joaquin Valley — Merriam was the guy who led the first scientific excavations there on behalf of UC Berkeley. He described Smilodon californicus, the sabertooth cat, our official state fossil. He also co-founded the Save the Redwoods League, ran the Carnegie Institution and was president of the Geological Society of America for a term. The UC Museum of Paleontology has a page about him, as does Wikipedia.

Andrew C. Lawson (1861-1952) was buried at Mountain View but later removed to Toronto, presumably in a family plot up there but that’s where the trail ends. Here’s my favorite outcrop of Franciscan chert at the cemetery — Lawson gave the Franciscan complex its name.

Lawson, another Scottish immigrant, was very influential through his long tenure at UC Berkeley. He was the first decent mapper of Bay area rocks and a demanding instructor, emphasizing rigorous fieldwork. Many of the rock units around here were named by him. And of course he did heroic service after the 1906 earthquake, heading the Carnegie Commission that thoroughly studied the event in the aftermath. His two-volume report, published in 1908, is still known among seismologists as “the Lawson report.” He recognized and named the San Andreas Fault — wags suggest that he’d indirectly named it for himself. The mineral lawsonite is named for him.

But for my money, this guy buried in plot 6 is Mountain View’s leading geologist.

Nicholas Taliaferro (1889-1961), of the old Kentucky Taliaferros, pronounced his name “TALLifer” but his colleagues and students knew him as “Tucky,” presumably because of his accent. At UC Berkeley he succeeded Lawson in teaching field geology, up in these hills. In a Bay Nature piece in 2010, Erik Vance described Taliaferro’s teaching style, a story I used to hear too: “He would walk into the hills with his students, lean back on the head of his axe, stare at a rock, and light a cigarette. The confused students would look around, try to figure out what he was staring at, and start taking measurements. After a bit, Tucky would stand, wander to another rock, and have another smoke. If you missed it, you missed it.”

He ran the department’s Geology Summer Camps for 33 years, training more than a thousand future geologists to make sense of the land around them. And when he wasn’t doing that he patrolled the Coast Range and Sierra foothills, covering some 50,000 miles on foot and mapping 26 whole quadrangles, a land area probably exceeded only by the late Tom Dibblee. Every paper on Coast Range geology of any depth will cite Taliaferro’s work, even today. UC Berkeley has memorialized him on this page.

I would love to learn of other geologists buried at Mountain View. Or, for that matter, at any other Oakland cemetery — St. Mary, Home of Eternity, Home of Peace or Evergreen.

There is one more prominent California geoscientist I found: Eugene Hilgard (1833-1916), UC Berkeley’s first mineralogy professor, but far better known as a pioneer soil scientist. He’s in St. Mary, in the Dormitory B section.

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