David Dale Owen

David Dale Owen studied the land beneath America's growing farms, mines, and towns. His surveys helped people find coal, lead, and other resources in the young nation's western lands. For more than twenty years, New Harmony was the home base for his work.

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Searching for a Calling

David Dale Owen was born in 1807 at New Lanark, Scotland, where his father ran the cotton mills. He and his younger brother, Richard, were still at school in Europe when their father and older brothers first came to America. As a young man, David Dale studied art in London, but he decided he did not have the talent to become an artist. By 1826 he was studying chemistry instead.

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David Dale came to New Harmony in 1828, at age twenty-one. He then earned a medical degree in Ohio. But he found the sight of so much physical suffering too painful to bear, so he did not practice medicine for long. Instead, he turned to geology. He taught himself the subject by studying William Maclure's large collection of rocks and minerals in New Harmony.

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Surveying the West

In 1837 and 1838, David Dale made Indiana's first geological survey. In 1839 the federal government hired him to survey the lead-mining region of what is now Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois. He trained more than one hundred assistants and finished the huge project in just a few months. In the late 1840s, he led a larger federal survey of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. His detailed report became a model for later surveys.

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David Dale ran this work from New Harmony, which became the center of geology in the United States. At one time, ten of the twenty-four recognized scientists living in New Harmony were geologists. David Dale went on to serve as state geologist of Kentucky, Arkansas, and Indiana.

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Family Life in New Harmony

In 1837 David Dale married Caroline Neef, the daughter of the teacher Joseph Neef. It was a triple wedding: his brothers Richard and William were married in the same ceremony. For a time, the three couples lived in the large house on Church Street known as the "Mansion," along with their older brother Robert Dale Owen, their sister Jane, and their spouses. Later, David Dale lived quietly with Caroline and their four children in the Rapp-Maclure house.

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The Laboratory and the Smithsonian

In 1846 Congress passed the bill, introduced by Robert Dale Owen, that created the Smithsonian Institution. David Dale went to Washington to help design its building. Back home, he built a laboratory with a cone-shaped tower facing Church Street. The building is said to have been influenced by architect James Renwick's Gothic design for the Smithsonian still stands in New Harmony today.

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Final Years and Legacy

David Dale Owen died in New Harmony in 1860 at the age of fifty-three. His brother Richard completed his work as Indiana's state geologist. David Dale's surveys helped open the Midwest to mining and farming, and the geologists he trained carried his methods across the country. His laboratory remains a reminder of the years when New Harmony was a leading center of American science.