MOBILE, Alabama -- For many of us, geology, phrenology and theology are of little interest. One rock looks suspiciously like another, all heads have bumps and speculation about the nature of God can go on forever. This was pretty much the position of this reviewer with regard to geology until "Eugene Allen Smith's Alabama: How a Geologist Shaped a State" by Aileen Kilgore Henderson came along.

Dr. Eugene Allen Smith had an absolutely fascinating career, capped by being the state’s geologist from 1873 until his death in 1927. His field research during that time made industrialization and urbanization possible in a poor, cotton-growing state. He was one of the most respected natural scientists in the United States, served on all sorts of national projects and regularly attended national scientific society meetings.

Smith also was a professor at the University of Alabama from the latter part of the Civil War until his death. He taught hundreds of students, almost all of whose names he remembered long after they left the university. He earned a doctorate from the University of Heidelberg (1868), played flute in the Tuscaloosa Symphony and helped to organize the university’s sports teams, including football (he attended the first Alabama-Auburn game).

This diminutive Confederate veteran traveled all over Alabama, visiting every county in a mule-drawn wagon long before there was anything resembling roads as we know the term. He kept a diary, wrote many letters, took photos, made sketches, and saw to it that they were all preserved. His accounts of his expeditions over more than half a century are the basis for “Eugene Allen Smith’s Alabama,” ably written by Henderson, who has had a fascinating life herself. She has done her research well and gives us a very engaging picture of one of Alabama’s most remarkable men.

Eugene Allen Smith’s Alabama: How a Geologist Shaped a State

By Aileen Kilgore Henderson

NewSouth Books, $34.95

Reviewed by MICHAEL THOMASON

Correspondent

Smith loved the University of Alabama, and his roots ran deep in its founding years, but he also loved exploring the countryside, collecting geological and botanical data. He never missed a chance wherever he was to examine such things, collect specimens and write up his findings. He was the state’s second geologist, after Michael Tuomey, who had held that position before the Civil War. Like Tuomey, Smith looked for and found minerals which Alabama’s industrialists would use to build the empire of coal, iron and steel after the war. He did not profit personally from his scientific work. He did it to change Alabama and break the grip King Cotton held on its people. He was no revolutionary, but he was a progressive, big and little P. He believed in progress and improvement and did all he could to supply the data needed.

Smith was simply indefatigable. Every summer he spent two to three months exploring the state’s mineral and botanical wealth. He was regularly rained on, had recurrent bouts of malaria, and endured all manner of physical hardships. He loved it for all of five decades. He knew the state so well (and its political and economic leaders) that he was a major force in bringing hard-surfaced roads to the state. After all, he had drawn the best maps, and he knew where gravel deposits were to use in surfacing the roads and where minerals to make cement for the bridges were to be found. And he knew why the state needed modern roads, having fought to travel on their muddy, unimproved and treacherous predecessors.

Smith visited Mobile and Baldwin Counties frequently over the years, and he was often accompanied on expeditions all over the state by Dr. Charles Mohr, a Mobile pharmacist and recognized botanical expert. Smith took note of efforts to find oil and gas in Mobile and Baldwin counties and visited with friends here.

The reader comes away from this book feeling that Smith knew everyone and was universally respected for his intellectual drive and curiosity and his many talents. In many ways he was a Renaissance man, devoting his long life to his native state’s progress.

A good man, Smith was nonetheless a man of his times. For example, in his many comments on mines and mills, he doesn’t talk about the workforce except to note that many were convict-lease laborers. He waxes lyrical about the careful shaping of the walls of a coal shaft, but not a word about the men who, often working in awful conditions, did the work he so admired. For a man who read literature, played classical music and cared so deeply for Alabama, it seems a strange omission, especially in such a kind and brilliant man.

The author provides a gazetteer so readers can locate place names in the appropriate counties. Many, such as Lick Skillet, are now long gone. Maps of Smith’s summer expeditions would have been nice, but very difficult and expensive to produce. There are a great many of Smith’s photographs in this book, but the quality of the reproduction leaves something to be desired. Having seen his negative collection many years ago, I believe better reproduction would have been possible. Sadly, many of his negatives had even then disappeared from the collection, though still cited in the collection’s card catalog. It is a terrible thing to have happened to the important records of such a careful scholar.

Smith was not an ivory-tower intellectual. He was a hard-working scholar who did all he could to advance knowledge of Alabama’s minerals, fossil records and contemporary botany. He answered thousands of requests for analysis of mineral samples from people great and small across the state, advised political leaders and industrialists, and was a fixture at university academic and cultural events. Henderson’s book captures his active, adventurous and scholarly life. Smith would have enjoyed reading it, and so will anyone interested in Alabama.

Michael Thomason is a professor emeritus of history at the University of South Alabama.