Frank Tweedy (1854–1937) was an American topographer and botanist. He worked on pioneering surveys first in the Adirondacks, and then in the American West. He also made major contributions to our knowledge of the western flora and vegetation. He is perhaps best known for his studies in Yellowstone National Park.
Life Ancestry and early life Frank Tweedy was born to Oliver Burr and Maria Lord Tweedy in New York City in 1854, the youngest of nine children. His surname refers to the River Tweed in the Borders region of Scotland and England. His ancestors were among the separatist Pilgrims who arrived in New England on the Mayflower. His great great grandfather, Colonel Andrew Burr (1696-1763), commanded the Connecticut militia in the capture of Louisburg during the French and Indian Wars."Fiftieth Reunion Class Book", Schenectady, NY: Union College, 1925 Frank's father, Oliver Burr (1806–1898), was in the fur hat business. He moved the business from Danbury, CT, to his wife Maria Lord's (1813–1883) home in New York City. Frank Tweedy's ancestors operated five Tweedy hat and clothing businesses in Danbury during the 1800's.
Education
Frank Tweedy attended public and private schools in New York City. During this time, he read journals from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which appear to have had a strong influence on his life (he referred to them over a dozen times in an autobiographical article). Also formative in his development, Frank spent many summers of his boyhood and young manhood in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York. The map included here shows the main watershed regions for the Adirondack Mountains with the star marking Twitchell Lake in Big Moose, NY, where Frank Tweedy had a surveying basecamp for his 1879 season.
In 1873, Frank entered Union College in Schenectady, New York as a sophomore. While in college he participated in sports, serving as captain and stroke of his crew in the intercollegiate regatta on Saratoga Lake, N.Y., held in July 1875. He graduated in 1875 with a degree in civil engineering. In August after his graduation, Frank resided in the hamlet of Number Four, the main western gateway to the Adirondack wilderness 18 miles east of Lowville, NY, where he collected and reported one of his first plant specimens collected on the shore of Beaver Lake—northeastern bladderwort or Utricularia resupinata. Another specimen Frank collected in the shallow water of Beaver Lake that summer was yellow pond-lily, botanical name Nuphar lutea.
Career and later life Frank Tweedy worked as a surveyor on the Adirondack Survey (1876–1879); as a sanitation engineer in Newport, Rhode Island (1880–1882); as a surveyor for the Northern Pacific Survey in Washington Territory (1882–1884); and as a surveyor and topographer for the US Geological Survey, mainly in the Rocky Mountains, from 1884 until his retirement in 1928.
Tweedy's routine during this time was to do survey fieldwork during the summer season, and then engage in map production—often a two-year process—off-season. At the same time, he continued to collect plants, publishing occasionally, and building his reputation as a botanist. When his family relocated from New York City to Plainfield, NJ, in the mid-1870s, Union College's Concordiensis informed alumni two years after his graduation that "Tweedy is botanizing at Plainfield, N.J."
Frank Tweedy married Emma Adelaide Hayden in December 1889; they had two children, a son Temple Hayden, and a daughter, Gertrude. Frank and Emma raised their family in the District of Columbia, having moved there when he joined the USGS. Frank became a member of the following clubs and societies:
Tweedy died in 1937 in Washington DC.
Survey and topography
Adirondack Mountains, New York
After graduating from Union College, Frank Tweedy went to work for the Western Division of the Adirondack Survey, headed by Verplanck Colvin. With experienced surveyor Squire Snell, he spent four years surveying and mapping two major sections in the central Adirondacks—the 69-mile east-west Beaver River basin and the 26-mile north-south survey of the western border of one of the oldest land purchases in the Adirondacks. The thickness of the wilderness, and resulting poor visibility of established towers and stations, forced crews in the western Adirondacks to rely heavily on ground surveys. During this four-year time-frame, Frank was based in Plainfield, New Jersey. His off-season activities included work on plant collecting and drafting of Adirondack Survey maps for Verplanck Colvin.
This map of Beaver Lake in the hamlet of Number Four is one of six Tweedy produced for Colvin, showing his survey "Line of Levels" between Beaver and Francis Lakes with Stations and Benchmarks labeled, and perpendicular Offset Lines to important features up to a mile on either side for inclusion on an accurate topographical map of the Adirondacks.Tweedy, Frank. "Beaver River Survey, Baselines & Topography". This image used courtesy of the Adirondack Experience: The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake, New York. http://adirondack.pastperfectonline.com Colvin included this map in his 1880 Seventh Annual Report on the Progress of the Topographical Survey of the Adirondack Region of New York, with a glowing tribute to his young surveyor: "Both the field and map work have been executed by Assistant F. Tweedy, C. E., whom I placed in charge of this division, and the results are very satisfactory and extremely creditable to him. His experiences in effecting the first survey of this wild and romantic stream have been varied and remarkable, and the labor severe."
Tweedy's second main task for the Adirondack Survey was to resurvey the western boundary to the 1771 Totten and Crossfield (T&C) Purchase of over a million acres of land. Verplanck Colvin frequently lamented "the stigma of unreliability and uncertainty" for all the old lines for counties, townships, and land purchases, which thousands of deeds were based on." After an accurate survey by Tweedy, this important Line and all its nearby topographical features could be included in a final Adirondack map. Tweedy accompanied Colvin in discovery of "The Great Corner" at the northwest starting point on this Line, which was "the great pivotal point on which all the land titles of nearly five millions of acres depended." This lithograph was drawn by Colvin and is a great study of what an Adirondack survey crew would have looked like in the late nineteenth century. A group of camp owners on Twitchell Lake in Big Moose, NY—where Frank Tweedy had his 1879 basecamp while surveying the southern half of the T&C Line—rediscovered the monument cairn Frank restored in 1879 at the corner of Townships 42 and 41 on that Line 1.5 miles north of their Lake. That Purchase had been divided into fifty Townships in 1772 in expectation of selling the Township Lots to farmers at a handsome profit. It took land speculators over a hundred years to realize this wilderness and climate were not conducive to farming. The three maps Tweedy produced for the Adirondack Survey of the 26-mile Totten & Crossfield western boundary are viewable through NYS Archive's Digital Collection. Frank's two maps of the Beaver River have been combined into one on a website for navigating the Stillwater Reservoir, formed after Beaver River was dammed up in two stages just before and after 1900. In May 2021, Benchmark No. 4-- one of five Colvin instructed Tweedy to install along that 24-mile T&C western boundary line—was discovered "in the solid rock" directly under that cairn of stones marking an important historical Corner.
American west In 1882, Tweedy was appointed assistant topographer for the Northern Transcontinental Survey, in Washington (he continued to live in Newport during the winter). Thus began Tweedy's explorations—topographical and botanical—of the American West. This excursion, not far north of the route taken by Lewis and Clark, became the centerpiece in Frank Tweedy's autobiography, where he narrated seven dangers faced that tested his faith and shaped his character. Richard U. Goode headed up the team and kept a Diary during survey for the Northern Pacific Railroad, holding Tweedy in high esteem as topographer and plant-collector.
An Oregon newspaper reported on the crew's mission as they passed through Portland, verifying heights above sea level for key mountain peaks and passes, and taking inventory of the unique variety in tree species: "The forestry expert finds that the trees of the Cascade mountains are greater in variety than in any other part of the United States if not in the world." The New York Public Library holds a collection of maps drafted during this two-season tour, crediting Tweedy's work on topography and publishing a map of Yakima City color coding the hemlocks, pines, and spruce species present in that wilderness.
Two years later, in 1884, Tweedy joined the US Geological Survey first as topographer, and then topographical engineer (1915). Frank summarized this long stretch in his career as follows: "Worked in the Yellowstone Park, followed with map work in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. The work was mainly along the Rocky Mountains." When not in the field, he lived in Washington DC, drafting maps, exchanging best practices with peers, and mentoring new members. Tweedy retired from the USGS in 1928.
Tweedy's first survey project with the USGS was in Yellowstone National Park, in 1884 and 1885, with publication in 1896 of a four-sheet set of Quadrangles shown here detailing "the entire park trails, hot springs, rivers and creeks, marshes, geysers, lakes, ponds, roads, and houses. Also specifically notes the Continental Divide." Tweedy's survey work at this time added to a new effort by USGS to create and publish a Geologic Atlas of the United States," with Frank's topographical contribution on the "Three Forks, Montana Folio which was part of this publication. This atlas included in-depth explanation of the geological evolution of this region 110 miles north of Yellowstone.
With few visible peaks in his earlier Adirondack survey work, Tweedy was unable to lay out many right triangles with a baseline for calculating multiple distances from that base via Pythagorean geometry. In the Rocky Mountains peaks were commonly visible from the ground, although terrain was much more rugged. In the 1888 to 1899 timeframe, Frank set up a system of triangulation using the Yellowstone River and the Union Pacific Railroad as a baseline, sighting his instrument to "stone cairns on the higher points or simple wooden tripods 10 to 20 feet high on the lower points." The National Geologic Map Database project (NGMDB) lists the following Quadrangles for which Frank Tweedy headed up both triangulation and topography: In Montana, Helena & Fort Logan (1888) and Big Timber (1889); and for Wyoming, Ishawooa (1893), Laramie (1895), Bald Mtn (1898), Dayton (1899), and South Dakota-Newcastle (1899).Washington, DC: USGS's National Geospatial Program (NGP) & National Geologic Map Database (NGMDB) Project, accessed on November 21, 2020 from https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/#4/39.98/-100.06 In 1892 and 1893, Frank Tweedy worked for the USGS in Albany County, Wyoming, to produce the Laramie Sheet (1:125,000 topographic map, published in 1895) pictured here."Topographical Survey" Laramie Boomerang No. 3 March 30, 1893, page 4