Gilbert Thompson

Gilbert Thompson

Editor’s note: Mr. Know-It-All is an occasional feature in which we answer reader questions about local history. Got a good question for Mr. Know-It-All? See the email address at the bottom of this story.

While scanning through local histories, Mr. K never ceases to be amazed by the accomplishments of citizens in our area. For example, who knew that a Mendon resident co-founded the National Geographic Society?

Well, Mr. K assumes a few people knew, such as relatives of the resident, historians, society members and your basic brainiacs. So now everyone will know, or at least everyone who reads this column. His name was Gilbert Thompson, and for further information on this fine gentleman Mr. K turns to a tribute penned by Marcus Benjamin, who, like Thompson, was a member of the Society of Colonial Wars in the District of Columbia, an article written by Mark Collins Jenkins for the National Geographic Society and Wikipedia.

Thompson was born to William V. and Harriet (Gilbert) Thompson in Mendon on March 21, 1839. Sources on the Hopedale-Mendon Historical Society website point out that the section of Mendon where Thompson was born is now Blackstone. He comes from impressive lineage as his great-grandmother was Deborah Sampson, who fought in the Revolutionary War as Private Robert Shurtleff.

When Thompson was 10, his parents moved to the Utopian community in Hopedale founded by Adin Ballou. While there, Thompson developed a love of books and trained to become a printer. His first job was as a printer’s assistant. In 1861 he left for Boston, where he enlisted in the Union Army to fight in the Civil War despite growing up in a pacifist milieu. We should add that Ballou was also an abolitionist. Now it’s time for one of those twists of fate that often change lives. Here, a mere slip of the enlistment clerk’s pen altered Thompson’s life.

“It had been his turn that November day in 1861 to step up to the recruiting officer and declare his desire to go to war,” writes Jenkins. “Asked his trade, he had replied, ‘I am a printer.’ Only after he had reached the mobilization camp several days later was he sent to where only officers were lounging. Puzzled, he asked one of them why he was there. A young officer checked his paperwork and replied, ‘You are an artist, I believe.’ ‘No, sir,’ replied Thompson. ‘When you enlisted, did you not say you were a painter?’ asked the officer. ‘No, sir. I said I was a printer,’ answered Thompson. ‘Well,’ said the officer, ‘for heaven’s sake, don’t say anything, but you’ve been assigned to the engineers.’

“The new recruit was then taken behind the tent, and the worried officer taught Mr. Gilbert Thompson the use of compass and plane table. And that was how a typographer became a topographer—and, as most of his later associates at the U.S. Geological Survey would say, one of the best topographers they ever knew.”

Basically because of that pen slip, Thompson, instead of becoming an infantryman in this deadly war, became a combat engineer.

“After the war was over, Thompson settled in Washington, D.C, where his knowledge of topography combined with military experience was promptly taken advantage of by the War Department in other ways,” writes Jenkins, “and he soon found himself back in Virginia and Maryland in order to survey the recent battlefields. Many a beautifully executed map in the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion has the name ‘G. Thompson’ listed among its creators.”

While in Washington, Thompson became associated with the U.S. Geological Survey and in 1872 joined the Wheeler Survey, considered one of the four great western surveys of the post-Civil War period. He would stay on the Wheeler Survey for the next seven years. In 1875 he led an expedition to Spirit Mountain in Nevada, of which he provided the first topographical sketch.

After joining the Wheeler Survey in 1878, a British-born magazine writer, William Henry Rideing, described Thompson as being “one of the most daring of mountaineers and cheeriest of companions; a kindly soul, whose spirit goes up as difficulties and discomforts increase.”′

In 1879, when the four competing surveys were consolidated into a single U.S. Geographical Survey, Thompson won the position as a topographer.

He would also win “a kind of undying fame outside the annals of mapmaking,” Jenkins writes. “Since the western surveys began, scientists and explorers had to make use of local teamsters and packers, men hired and discharged as need be, many being of ‘dubious moral character,’ as the general tenor of description ran. By 1882, the story goes, Thompson had fallen into the habit of issuing his pay orders with his own thumbprint inked on them, verifying that he indeed was the team leader who had submitted the requisition for someone to be paid the amount written over the print. This is generally conceded to be the first such use of fingerprinting for
identification purposes in the United States.”

As a topographer, Thompson didn’t let such minor inconveniences as storms and forest fires prevent him for doing his job. He still succeeded in outfitting several field parties with pack trains, teamsters, cooks, wagons and mules, and in little more than two months in the fall of 1882 managed to map 2,000 square miles and establish 125 barometric points. “As a result, within two years he had completed a detailed map of the Mount Shasta region; a good start, for standing alone in bold relief out of a sea of forest, Shasta, one of the southernmost volcanoes of the Cascade Range, dominated an area of about 24,000 square miles,” Jenkins writes.

“After spending his summers in the mountains, Thompson would return to Washington for the winter,” Jenkins continues. “And it was on one winter’s evening in January 1888 that Thompson turned up at the Cosmos Club in response to an invitation to discuss the wisdom of establishing a society dedicated to the ‘increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge.’ He and 32 others agreed on this idea; and a week later, their numbers augmented to about 70, they decided to associate themselves as the National Geographic Society.

“Neither he nor anyone else involved in those events could have foreseen what would grow out of those early meetings. But surely he would have been pleased to know that the National Geographic magazine’s very first map supplement, issued in 1889, was the U.S. Geological Survey’s ‘North Carolina—Tennessee—Asheville Sheet,’ a quadrangle produced by his division.

In 1898, Thompson made his last field trip to the West, mapping the 143 square miles of the Helena, Montana, quadrangle. After that, he was mostly in the Washington office.

In addition to joining the the Society of Colonial Wars in the District of Columbia, Thompson joined the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution and the Society of the War of 1812 and remained active in the Grand Army of the Republic and the Society of the Army of the Potomac.

“Above all, he grew increasingly absorbed in history,” Jenkins writes. “The old mapmaker triangulated his way with happy abandon across the rolling landscapes of the past. He traced his genealogy with the same attention to detail with which he once sketched the buttes and spires of the West, finding connections through his mother’s family both to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh and a famous explorer in his own right, and to Captain Myles Standish, the Mayflower’s leading soldier and hero of Longfellow’s famous poem. At heart he was an antiquarian, a man whose fascinations ran toward disregarded objects and artifacts and quirky, little-investigated corners of the past.”

On June 8, 1909, Major Gilbert Thompson, the oldest member of the Topographic Branch, died at the age of 70.

“It is not easy to write either in detail or at length of Major Thompson’s personal character,” writes Benjamin in his tribute, “but a sympathy and freshness of enthusiasm and a remarkable interest in everything that pertained to his work were striking characteristics. He found recreation in music and was a sympathetic performer on the violin, but with that remarkable persistence of his, he studied that wonderful instrument in many ways. The construction of the violin itself, the relation of the f-holes to the volume of sound, the effect of different varnishes upon the quality of tone, were all subjects to which he gave much time and thought. Nor was it alone this phase of art which interested him; for his skill with his pen… led to facility in handling the brush, as many watercolors now preserved by his family, testify. Also he was particularly clever in that branch of art called pyrography. With a hot instrument he burnt into wood strong and picturesque sketches which were much sought after by those who appreciated that kind of work.

“Religion was his consolation, and he was a regular attendant at the services of the Protestant Episcopal Church, being for many years a communicant of St. Andrew’s, but more recently of St. Michael and All Angels, where his religious activities found recognition by an election to the vestry, a place which he held at the time of his death.

“Gilbert Thompson was a true and honorable American gentleman, and of a type which we may all do well to emulate.”

Milford Sunday News, June 11, 2016

Mr. Know-It-All, aka Bob Tremblay, can be reached at 508-626-4409 or rtremblay@wickedlocal.