Spencer, Joseph William Winthrop

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Gerard V. Middleton, “SPENCER, JOSEPH WILLIAM WINTHROP,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 15, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/spencer_joseph_william_winthrop_15E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Geologist, teacher, geomorphologist, and author; b. 26 March 1851 in Dundas, Upper Canada, son of Joseph Spencer and Eliza Elenora Coe; nephew of James Spencer; m. 15 April 1896 Katharine (Kate) Sinclair Thomson in Toronto; they had no children; d. there 9 Oct. 1921.
    • Joseph William Spencer’s great-grandfather Robert Spencer was a loyalist from New Jersey and New York who had served with Butler’s Rangers during the American Revolutionary War. Spencer believed that he was related to the Winthrops of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and after he moved to the United States, he added Winthrop to his name, though he generally signed J. W. Spencer. His father, who had founded the Gore grist and paper mills in Dundas, died when he fell from the roof of one of the mill buildings shortly after his son’s birth. Young Joseph was educated in Dundas, but in 1867 he and his mother moved to Hamilton, where he worked for two years for druggists T. Bickle and Son. By this time he was already interested in geology and chemistry, in part stimulated by his contact with amateur geologists active in the Hamilton Association, which sought to promote literature, science, and art.
    • Spencer became professor of geology and chemistry at King’s College, in Windsor, N.S., in 1880. Two years later he was appointed to the chair in geology and mineralogy and curator of a new natural history museum at the University of Missouri. He helped to design, build, and equip the museum, but university president Samuel Spahr Laws’s plans ran into political and financial troubles, and Spencer lost his position. He joined the University of Georgia in 1888 and became state geologist two years later. He began a geological survey of the northwest part of the state, but soon faced political problems once again since he was more interested in stratigraphy than in gold mining. In 1894 he moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a consultant geologist until his return to Canada in 1920. 
    • Spencer’s first publication in 1875 dealt with the geology of the Hamilton region. Among other early work to appear in print was a paper on the Michigan copper mines read before the Natural History Society of Montreal in 1876 and published that year in the Canadian Naturalist(Montreal) and several on the Palaeozoic geology and fossils of the head of Lake Ontario. His significant research began with his study of preglacial valleys, including the buried Dundas valley, which he originally interpreted as part of an early river system (he called it the Erigan River) draining west through the Lake Erie basin.
    • As far as his teaching duties would allow, Spencer spent the years between 1881 and 1889 working on raised beaches of lakes formed at the end of the ice age (“proglacial lakes”). Many of these beaches were first mapped and named by him. That of the Lake Ontario basin he called the Iroquois beach, described in a paper published in the transactions of the Royal Society of Canada in 1890.
    • Spencer’s earliest paper on Niagara Falls was published in 1887. He returned to the area often, even after he moved to the United States, and in 1905 he persuaded Bell, who was acting director of the Geological Survey of Canada, to sponsor a new study of the falls. Published in 1907, it involved a detailed re-survey of the crest line to determine the rate of recession and the first accurate determination of the depth of the river at the whirlpool and just below the falls. His theoretical analysis of the relationship between the rate of erosion and river discharge was criticized by Gilbert in a review published the following year in the journal Science (New York). As a result of his incorrect mechanical investigation and flawed study of the drainage history, Spencer’s estimates of the age of the falls could not be taken very seriously, even before the era of carbon-14 dating. Nevertheless, the book was generally well received at the time, and the survey data are still valuable.
  • Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=7947
  • Find a Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/96022713/joseph_william-winthrop-spencer