Chapter XV: His Last Years in Virginia

Maury arrived at New York on July 16, 1868, and was agreeably surprised at his treatment there. “The custom house authorities”, he wrote, “received me with marked consideration and passed all luggage without difficulty”. Early in August he reached Richmond, much pleased with his reception in his native state. “In the South”, he declared, “it’s been a sort of ovation.... My coming home to share the hard lot of these people instead of accepting French honors is looked upon as a high display of patriotism”.

After spending a part of the summer at the White Sulphur Springs as a guest of the proprietors, he was installed, on the 10th of September, in his professorial chair at Virginia Military Institute. The ceremonies were held in the open air on a temporary platform in front of the Superintendent’s quarters. The faculty of Washington College, of which General Robert E. Lee was then the Rector, were present, as well as a large number of the citizens of Lexington. Superintendent Francis H. Smith welcomed Maury on behalf of the Institute, and Governor Letcher, as a representative of the Board of Governors of which he was the president, also made an address of welcome. Maury gave an “extended commentary” on the sciences, as the principal speech of the day. On this occasion, according to one of his daughters, Maury wore his foreign decorations, and “the cadets were mightily pleased and cheered till their little throats were dry”.

PORTRAIT TAKEN DURING THE LAST YEARS OF MAURY, WHILE AT THE
VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE]

Maury did not take up his residence in Lexington until the following year, on June 10, as his house there was not ready for his family until that time. With Richmond as his home during the autumn and winter, he was busily engaged in lecturing, in making preparations for the physical survey of the material and mineral resources of Virginia, in distributing cinchona seeds which had been sent to him from England, in trying to arouse interest in the establishment of an agricultural school in connection with the Virginia Military Institute, and in working in the interest of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and the establishment of a direct line of steamers from Norfolk to Flushing. The most important address that he delivered during this period was given at the Staunton Fair on October 28, 1868. In this speech he referred to the opinion which had gotten abroad in the North, and even in England, that the South had become lacking in energy and enterprise, and he advised that they make use of their water power, encourage German and Dutch immigrants to come to Virginia, and begin to construct better roads.

When Maury went with his family to Lexington to reside, he was greatly pleased with his new home. “Here we are”, he wrote, “in our new home, busy fixing up; and things begin to know their places. So we also begin to have a home-feeling. People are very kind, the country is beautiful, the views and the scenery lovely, and both climate and air such that exercise is enjoyment”. In these congenial surroundings he set to work with a will in the performance of his new duties, special attention being given to the making of the physical survey of Virginia. The object of this work was twofold; namely, to hasten the development of all the state’s natural resources, agricultural and mineral, and to remove prejudice against the South so that immigrants would be attracted to the deserted farms. As in the old days at the Observatory, when he was investigating the winds and currents, Maury brought into play his power of inspiring others with enthusiastic coöperation, and soon reports and communications came pouring into his office at the Institute from all parts of the state. There was some rivalry, in the matter of the survey, between Washington College and Virginia Military Institute. Maury declared that the College tried to steal his thunder, and that he published what was called a “Preliminary Report” in order to “knock them on the head”. The complete survey was unfinished at the time of his death; but a portion of it was published by his son Matthew in 1878.

Maury also continued work on his geographical series, only the first two books of which had been published before he left England. The “Academic Geography” of the original plan was abandoned; but in 1871 his “Manual of Geography” appeared, and in 1873 his “Physical Geography”. The first was very favorably received. One review dwelt particularly on the author’s power of making a tedious and dry subject interesting and agreeable, commended the illustrations, and declared that the book would delight any schoolroom in which the teacher is not hopelessly unfit to teach. “We are sure”, it continued, “that where it is adopted the geography lesson will become suddenly and surprisingly popular”. The preface to the edition, which was revised by Mytton Maury and re-copyrighted in 1880 by the University Publishing Company, stated, “Among the marked excellences of the early edition was its presentation of geography in the character of a science rather than an assemblage of disconnected facts. Land and air and ocean were treated as parts of a grand mechanism; rivers were discussed not simply as ‘divisions of water’ but as having definite ‘offices’ to perform; mountains were not merely masses of a certain altitude, but regulators of rainfall. It was also carefully pointed out how the geographical position and climate of a country determine its industries. Trade was shown to be in a special manner under the influence of geographical law”.

In a still later revision[25] the publishers called attention to the fact that Maury’s text, wherever possible, was retained because it was “so clear, simple, and attractive that it has won for the book the uniform favor of the teachers using it. The original text makes up so large a part of the book that it is essentially Maury’s work. Maury’s Geographies never belonged to the old school, but rather to the new. Being devoted to the study of physical geography, and father of the science of ‘Physical Geography of the Sea’, he undertook the preparation of his book originally with the intention and purpose ‘to redeem the most delightful of subjects from the bondage of dry statistics on the one hand, and on the other, from the drudgery of vague, general ideas’”.

Maury’s first book on physical geography was published in London in 1864, while he was in England during the Civil War. It bore the title, “Physical Geography for Schools and General Readers”, and was translated into Dutch, French, and Russian. The book is said not to have been very popular in England, because it presupposed an “extent of knowledge among teachers in schools that seldom exists”. Maury accordingly entirely rewrote it for his series; as he says in the preface, it was begun in England in 1866 and was the joint work of him, his wife, and his daughters. This book also was revised after Maury’s death, and slightly abridged and re-arranged, though the charm of the author’s style was retained. Later, it was revised and largely re-written by Frederic William Simonds of the University of Texas, for the American Book Company, in 1908, though in doing so the attempt was made “to preserve as far as possible the plan of the older work—a plan that has met the approval of a generation of teachers—and at the same time to modernize the text thoroughly”.

In 1866, Maury began, under an agreement with his publisher Richardson, another book, entitled “Practical Astronomy for Schools”, and this was practically finished before he left England. But the work was never published, though it reached the stage of galley proof, in which condition it has been preserved among Maury’s papers. Its failure of publication was probably due to financial embarrassment on the part of the University Publishing Company, which became the firm name of Richardson’s company on January 1, 1869. For several years this company had a hard struggle and more than once was on the verge of bankruptcy. Maury experienced difficulty in collecting money due him from the company, and only the advice of his cousin Rutson kept him from resorting to law to force payments.

But all these financial matters were adjusted eventually in an amicable fashion, for the popularity of the geographical series brought in a great deal of money to all concerned. In 1871, Maury wrote that the geographies had already been adopted in more than 5000 schools in the South, with an average of some forty books to each school. A little afterwards he declared that the series had cleared during the year 1871 upwards of $30,000. Finally, on January 1, 1872, he sold all the copyrights to Richardson under the following agreement: “I have sold you the copyright _in this country_ to all the books, five in number, and wall maps, eight in the series, and you have paid for them in full. I am to revise and by new editions keep the said five books up to the times, for five years for $1000 in gold a year, counting from January 15, 1870. Two of these annual instalments have become due, for each of which I hold your note. The eight wall maps in place of the fourth school geography originally contracted for, were to be published in my name, but constructed at your expense and under my control so as to justify me in claiming their authorship. Besides this you have generously volunteered to pay me _during my life_ ten per cent upon the copy money annually coming to you upon any and all of the books and wall maps aforesaid”.

In 1870, Maury was offered the presidency of St. John’s College at Annapolis, Maryland, at a salary of $3000 and quarters for his family; but it was declined. He had come to believe that the winters, even of Virginia, were too severe for his health, and spent a portion of the winter of 1870–1871, with one of his daughters and his youngest son, at the home of a sister, Mrs. Halland, at Holly Springs, Mississippi and in New Orleans, Mobile, and Savannah.

Early in 1871, he was urged to become the President of the University of Alabama at a salary of $3500 and home, and with the privilege of selecting his faculty. The proposed salary was raised to $5000, so anxious were the board to have him at the head of the institution, and Maury finally accepted on July 30, 1871 by telegraph, “I will come”. But on August 17, he resigned the position on the grounds that the arrangements for funds for the University were unsatisfactory and not in agreement with verbal statements made to him. He had gone so far as to write out his inaugural address and send copies of it to various Southern newspapers, and his “Manual of Geography”, which was published at about this time, bore on its title page the statement that he was the President of the University of Alabama.

It was then that Raphael Semmes, famous commander of the _Alabama_, under the impression that Maury was soon to be at the head of the university of his native Alabama, wrote a eulogy of his friend, which appeared in the Montgomery _Advance_ of September 25, 1871. It closed with the following estimate of Maury’s achievements: “Thou hast revealed to us the secrets of the depths of the ocean, traced its currents, discoursed to us of its storms and its calms, and taught us which of its roads to travel and which to avoid. Every mariner, for countless ages to come, as he takes down his charts to shape his course across the seas, will think of thee! He will think of thee as he casts his lead into the deep sea; he will think of thee as he draws a bucket of water from it to examine its animalculæ; he will think of thee as he sees the storm gathering thick and ominous; he will think of thee as he approaches the calm-belts, and especially the calm-belts of the equator, with its mysterious cloud rings; he will think of thee as he is scudding before the ‘brave west winds’ of the Southern hemisphere; in short, there is no phenomenon of the sea that will not recall to him thine image. This is the living monument which thou hast constructed for thyself”.

Maury had, by this time, become dissatisfied with his situation at Lexington. “I shall not”, he wrote, “risk another winter here for two reasons—one on the score of health. The other—I have worked out Physical Survey as far as it can be worked out without money. And I feel that I am not earning my salt. Though the Board of Visitors and Faculty are kind enough to express quite a different opinion. So after the swallows come I shall begin to inquire about lodgings in Fredericksburg or Richmond. In all, except the salt-earning feature, my situation here is as delightful as man can make it”. Somewhat later, he declared, “They are sounding me about the University of Tennessee. Remember Alabama; I shall look very closely—and not trust to verbal statements—before I commit myself again. You know I intend to cut out from here at the end of the term anyhow. My situation here is charming and delightful as it can be. And though I may be rendering the state service, the state butters me no parsnips. Virginia Military Institute does that and though V. M. I. tries very kindly to persuade me that it’s all the same, I can’t see it. And so I am quite ready for Tennessee or anywhere else that will offer inducements sufficient”.

He, accordingly, handed in his resignation in May to take effect the following September; but there were so many protests against his action, from the Governor of the state all down the line, that he reconsidered the matter and agreed, in July, to remain at V. M. I. for the time being. After his resignation, he had been approached by a member of the Board of Trustees of the Agricultural College near Blacksburg, Virginia, who asked permission to propose Maury’s name as their president, but he declined the proposal. Inquiry was also made of him whether he would accept the presidency of a Polytechnic College to be founded at New Orleans. This appealed to him, particularly on the score of his health, but the project did not materialize.

In addition to his work on the “Physical Survey of Virginia” and his geographical series, Maury spent considerable time upon the preparation and delivery of lectures and addresses, not in great numbers during his first two years at Lexington but with increasing frequency during the last years of his life. Among the notable speeches he made during 1869 were an address to the graduating class of V. M. I., July 2, and another before the Educational Association of Virginia, on December 16. In the former, he emphasized the fact that what they accomplished in life would depend largely on their own ‘resolves’, that they had not ‘finished’ their education but merely laid the foundation, that they should desire to master the specialty they took up but not to become narrow-minded, and that they should form the habit of observing nature for there they would see God. In closing, he called upon them to live up to their traditions. The later address is a plea for the giving of more attention in the educational system to the study of the physical sciences in view of the progress and development of physical discoveries; it began with the statement that the study of science should not make atheists, if the subject was rightly interpreted.

Maury often lectured to the students of Virginia Military Institute, though he gave no regular courses of instruction; for example, in 1872 he gave a series of lectures to the cadets on “What We Owe to Science”. The larger number of his addresses were delivered, however, in the interest of the establishment of a system of universal telegraphic meteorological observations and crop reports,—the plan which he had urged for many years before the Civil War and which that unhappy conflict had cut short. Not long after his return to Virginia, he began to consider this cherished plan again. “You remember before the war”, he wrote, “how hard I tried to get up a Telegraphic Meteorological Bureau—writing and lecturing about it—now as meteorology for the farmers, now as storm-signals combined with crop statistics. When I was in England, during the war, I proposed to Fitzroy, and after his death to his successor, Toynbee, a plan for making, by means of an elastic cloth stretched over his map, a caste of the atmosphere, so that he might take in his whole field of observation at a single glance, and so predict with more certainty. Suppose, for instance, with his map pasted on a table, he had bored a hole through London, Liverpool, Portsmouth, etc., and stuck up in each place a little rod graduated for the barometer; that his elastic cloth was then fitted to a slide so that he could set it at the height of the barometer at each of the stations. Fancy each rod to be surmounted by a wind-vane which could be drawn out or shoved in, to show the force of the wind at each place. Thus you would have a ‘caste of the atmosphere’, and see all about it. Brooke—‘deep-sea lead’—has suggested just such a plan to Myer (General Albert James Myer of the Signal Bureau in Washington); and Myer, I have heard, has adopted it. The idea, I think, was as original with Brooke as it was with me”.

The first address which Maury delivered on the plan for land meteorological observations was at the fair of the Memphis Agricultural and Mechanical Society, on October 17, 1871. In this speech he said that he had dropped the subject at Brussels because the Royal Society of London had advised against it, but that he had ever since regretted this action because he had learned that all Europe had been with him except Bavaria. He then showed how the machinery for putting the scheme into operation in the United States already existed. “You have your Signal Office”, he declared, “where weather reports are continually received by telegraph, and whence telegraphic forecasts are issued daily.... You have also the Agricultural Bureau, in the service of which reports embodying many of the facts and observations required are already made, or might be without any additional expense.... Do you mean to say that amid all the mind, means, and appliances of the age, the relations between the weather and the crops are past finding out? If I could, with just such a system of researches for the sea, sit down in my office and tell the navigator how he would find the wind, at any season of the year, in any part of the ocean through which he wished to sail, am I promising too much when I tell you that by the plan I now propose the relation between the weather and the crops is as capable of scientific development as were the relations between sea-voyages and the winds twenty-five years ago?” At the close of the address, resolutions were offered that the United States government be petitioned through the State Department in favor of the establishment through international coöperation of a plan of universal telegraphic meteorological observations and crop reports, and that another conference similar to that of Brussels in 1853 be called for that purpose.

The different reaction of two of Maury’s friends to this speech is interesting. Rutson Maury wrote, “A large part of your Memphis Address that deals with mercantile matters is sheer nonsense.... You ought to have some Sancho Panza to accompany you when you go a-tilting”. Being a New Yorker, he would naturally not be in sympathy with an effort to deflect even a small part of its trade from that metropolis. Dr. Tremlett’s opinion of the speech was more complimentary. “I have”, he wrote, “read your last ‘spread eagle’ at Memphis. Capital, clever, business-like like everything you do; but unrealizable”.

The address was followed up by the sending of resolutions to various state governors, and some attempts were made to gain the coöperation of officials in Washington. In the latter quarter, however, no headway was made, as indicated in the following communication to Maury from Senator Johnston of Virginia: “I therefore called upon Mr. Watts, the Commissioner of Agriculture, who scarcely had the civility to hear me. He made the conversation very short, and said that he had just ordered the meteorological reports which his predecessor had been collecting and publishing to be discontinued. I ventured mildly to suggest that if meteorology did not appertain to his Department, at least Agriculture did. He gave this a qualified assent, but told me very positively that he would have nothing to do with the proposed scheme. I met with the same rebuff in other quarters and fancied that I saw a premeditated and arranged plan of resistance. Under these circumstances it was manifestly useless to move now, and so I have not offered the amendment (to provide funds for delegates to the International Agricultural Congress) and will not do so at this session. I am sorry indeed that a scheme so useful should be so treated”.

Maury was undaunted by such rebuffs and continued his campaign. On May 29, 1872 he addressed the National Agricultural Congress at St. Louis, declaring that Europe was ripe for such a scheme and citing the names of the following influential supporters of it abroad: Alexander Buchan, Secretary of the Scottish Meteorological Society; Commodore Jansen of Holland; Quetelet, Astronomer Royal and Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sciences of Brussels; Marie Davy, Zurcher, and Margolle, meteorologists and savants of France; and Father Secchi of the Collegio Romano in Italy. The legislatures of Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia, he declared, had passed resolutions instructing Congress to support an international conference; and he suggested that they bring further influence to bear on Congress through state agricultural societies, agricultural journals, and the general press of the country. He called attention to the fact that his interest in the scheme was not a private one, since he had no farm, and could not share in the honor of helping to organize and carry out the plan for the government. He closed with an eloquent plea, emphasizing the benefits to be derived, which he estimated would be as great as those formerly bestowed upon commerce by the results of the Brussels Conference.

On August 13 of the same year he spoke before the Agricultural Convention of Georgia at Griffin. Here he covered about the same ground that he had in his St. Louis speech, and used the same arguments, though the language was different and it was not a mere repetition of the former address. He also, in it, treated the question of immigration, saying that the prejudice which had arisen abroad against the South must be removed; and he once more touched upon the old problem of better trade communications for that section. This latter question had been in Maury’s mind for years, and he at this time advanced bold and original ideas as to the best means of improving conditions.

He declared in one of his letters to Dr. Tremlett that the seat of empire was fast settling down in the Northwest States. “They already give the Presidents”, he wrote, “and will soon dictate the foreign policy of the country. They must have a better way to the sea. They have been taught to believe—erroneously—that the best way lies through Canada and the St. Lawrence. It does not; it lies through Virginia. You will appreciate my feeling on this subject, when I remind you that grain is sent around Cape Horn from California, and delivered at the ports along the Atlantic seaboard at ten cents the bushel cheaper than it can now be sent from Iowa and other Northwest States; that the people throughout these states—and they are the grain-growing states—know that, with a good highway to the Atlantic seaboard, the value of their grain would be enhanced ten, twenty, even thirty cents the bushel; and they think that Canada and the St. Lawrence can give them such a way. The greatest difficulty in teaching these people that their best way to the sea lies through Virginia, not through Canada, is to get our people to raise funds for the gratuitous circulation of the Reports (Preliminary Report on the Resources of Virginia) in sufficient numbers between this and the next meeting of Congress in December. If we can do that, the Northwest States will raise their voices in favor of the Virginia route, and demand the money to open it. When that is done, they will not want Canada, and we shall have peace. Thus you see, my friend, I am aiming high and striking far. But with a few heads such as yours to help, we would hit the mark as sure as a gun”. Not only in his correspondence, but also in the press as well as in his speeches he continued to advocate direct trade between the South and Europe through the establishment of a Norfolk to Flushing line of steamers, which would turn the tide of immigration toward the Southern States.

On the 18th of September, 1872, Maury spoke to the Farmers’ Club of Norfolk, Massachusetts, near Boston. On this occasion, he made a very tactful speech with happy references to his old friend John Quincy Adams, and used only the portions of his previous speeches in favor of meteorological and agricultural observations, that were best adapted to a Northern audience. From here he traveled to St. Louis by way of New York, Niagara Falls (Buffalo), Detroit, and Chicago. On October 9, before the St. Louis Agricultural and Mechanical Association at its annual fair, he spoke as in the year previously on the plan of international coöperation, using the same arguments but adding that at the recent International Congress of Statisticians at St. Petersburg, Russia his scheme had been cheered “by the huzzas of Russians, hochs of Germans, vivas of Latin races, and the hurrahs of the English”, and that a special committee had been appointed to further the movement.

Maury was so exhausted, however, by the time he reached St. Louis and was so ill that he could hardly read his address in an audible tone. As a matter of fact, in the summer preceding this lecture tour he had been very ill of the gout and was for a time on crutches. Consequently, when he reached home after spending some two weeks in St. Louis, he was too ill to attend the first annual fair of the Seaboard Agricultural Society, which he was to have addressed at Norfolk, Virginia, on October 23. His address had already been prepared; and as it turned out to be his last, its contents are of peculiar interest. He appealed to the farmers in regard to the necessity of coöperation for self-protection and redress against transportation monopolies and all sources of oppression and discouragement; he contended that domestic commerce should be attended to by Congress as carefully as foreign trade, but that special legislation protected the latter while the former was left to the tender mercies of great corporations; he touched upon his favorite topic of weather observations and crop reports, and many other questions such as tolls and tariffs, the government of railroads, interior water lines and canal projects, the conjunction of the Atlantic and the Mississippi River valley, east and west trunk lines and branches and the ways and means of constructing them without increase of taxation, the regulation of commerce between the states, the naval establishment and wherein it needed reforms, immigration, and labor and capital.

Maury was destined not to live to see the scheme of meteorological observations and crop reports, upon which he had spent so much thought and labor, in operation; but not long after his death a part of his program was carried out when there was an international conference of meteorologists at Vienna in 1873, the United States being represented by General Albert James Myer of the Signal Service of the Army. There are, indeed, those who would deny him any part in the establishment of the present Weather Bureau. On the contrary, there are others who would go to the opposite extreme and give him all the credit for bringing it about. For example, Mr. E. P. Dorr, who was at one time an observer for the Smithsonian and afterwards President of the Board of Lake Underwriters, wrote to Mr. Thompson B. Maury, at that time (1873) in the Signal Office, in Washington that Maury’s “intelligent, original mind invented and suggested the present system of meteorological observations; and the writer wishes this in some way to be put upon record, to do justice to the dead Maury, a man whose name and memory will live in all civilized countries on the globe, throughout all time, as an original, great mind.... I could not rest unless I told some one that the late M. F. Maury was the originator in design and detail, in all its parts, of the present system of meteorological observations now so generally taken all over the country”.

The question of due credit is a perplexing one; but certainly no one could cavil at the modest claim made by Maury’s son Matthew in the following letter: “In 1869, Abbé took the question up and began issuing local forecasts from Cincinnati Observatory and out of his success here and efforts in Washington grew the Weather Bureau in November, 1870, with General Myer at its head, to whom belongs the credit of working up all the details and putting the thing on such a practical footing. Till now the Washington work is the admiration of all the world as its daily charts and reports embrace not only the United States but the whole of the northern hemisphere, Australia, and the Cape of Good Hope. Now I think that any calm mind can only say for Father that he had the clearness of foresight to foresee what could be done for the land with the aid of regular stations and the telegraph, but we can’t in the smallest degree say that its practical success is due to him. In the future, General Myer will have that credit. Father’s reputation must rest on his work at sea and a biography can only speak of other things as indications of his clear and far-seeing mind. The world is full of similar cases in all great improvements, and the world invariably gives the credit not to the man who first thought of them but to the man who puts the ideas into practise”.

When Maury was stricken with sickness on his last lecturing tour, he seemed to realize that he would not recover, for when he arrived at home and entered the house he said to his wife, “My dear, I am come home to die”. He was immediately helped to his bed, though death did not come until after four long months, during a portion of which time he suffered extreme pain. When not suffering too much, he occupied himself with a revision of his “Physical Geography”.

During his long illness, the strength of his Christian faith displayed itself, and he became wholly resigned to the inevitable. Job had always been his favorite book in the Bible; and the 130th Psalm, which he called “De Profundis” and which was sung at Luther’s funeral amid the tears of the people, was read to him, at his request, many times during his last days. He was greatly comforted by a week’s visit which his brother-in-law, Dr. Brodie S. Herndon of Savannah, made him in the December preceding his death. And towards the end he sent sincere farewell messages to Commodore Jansen in Holland, whom he had loved for many years as a brother, and also to Dr. Tremlett who had brightened with his friendship the desolate years of his exile in England and had influenced him to enter the communion of the Church. A few days before his death he dismissed his physicians, saying, “Don’t come to see me any more; leave me to the great Physician”.

He derived his greatest consolation and satisfaction from having his family about him, for whom he had always shown throughout his life the tenderest affections of a devoted father and husband. As he talked to them, there would come flashes of his quaint playful humor that had always been so characteristic of him; and he requested that there be no weeping in his presence. He rejoiced in being able to recognize all his family to the end. “You see”, said he, “how God has answered my prayers, for I know you every one.... I shall retain my senses to the last. God has granted me that as a token of my acceptance. I have set my house in order, my prayers have all been answered, my children are gathered round my bed—and now Lord, what wait I for?” Then he would repeat the prayer which he had composed thirty years before when his leg was broken, and which he had repeated in his daily devotions ever since: “Lord Jesus, thou Son of God and Redeemer of the world, have mercy upon me! Pardon my offenses, and teach me the error of my ways; give me a new heart and a right mind. Teach me and all mine to do Thy will, and in all things to keep Thy law. Teach me also to ask those things necessary for eternal life. Lord, pardon me for all my sins, for Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen”.

On the evening before his death, the family sang for him verses from his favorite hymn, “Christ Is Risen”, which he called “Pass over Jordan”, and also from “How Firm a Foundation”. After the singing he said so that all could hear, “The peace of God which passeth all understanding be with you all—all!” Toward the end he inquired of his son Richard, “Are my feet growing cold? Do I drag my anchors?” Upon receiving an affirmative answer, he said, “All’s well”. About fifteen minutes before he died, his wife and daughters were requested by him to leave the room, and he was left with his two sons and two sons-in-law. At 12.40 P.M., on Saturday, February 1, 1873, his life came to a close.

The body lay in state in the hall of the Library of Virginia Military Institute from four o’clock in the afternoon of Monday until Wednesday. The gallery round the hall was festooned with black, a large anchor and a cross of evergreens being placed at alternate angles; while the columns were draped spirally. The wall was covered with maps constructed under Maury’s supervision, and on opposite sides of the gallery were placed two heavily draped flags, the one being that of his native state Virginia, and the other that of his adopted state Tennessee. In the center of the hall rested the bier, bearing his body, with his breast covered with the foreign orders that had been conferred upon him, and with a gentle smile on his face. Near the bier stood a large globe bearing this appropriate inscription: “The whole world is mourning for Maury”.

A funeral service was held in the hall on Wednesday about noon, by the Reverend William Pendleton, D. D. of Grace Church, after which the coffin, attended by the cadet battalion and the faculty of Virginia Military Institute and the professors and students of Washington and Lee University[26] and the citizens of Lexington, was conveyed to the Gilham vault in the city cemetery, just opposite the tomb of “Stonewall” Jackson. This, however, was only a temporary resting-place. When, shortly before his death, his wife had requested of Maury that she be permitted to bury him in Richmond, he had replied, “Very well, my dear; then let my body remain here until the spring, and when you take me through the Goshen Pass you must pluck the rhododendrons and the mountain-ivy and lay them upon me”.

“Home, bear me home, at last”, he said,
“And lay me where your dead are lying;
But not while skies are overspread,
And mournful wintry winds are sighing!

Wait till the royal march of spring
Carpets the mountain fastness over—
Till chattering birds are on the wing,
And buzzing bees are in the clover.

Wait till the laurel bursts its buds,
And creeping ivy flings its graces
About the lichened rocks—and floods
Of sunshine fill the shady places.

Then, when the sky, the air, the grass,
Sweet nature all, is glad and tender—
Then bear me through the Goshen Pass,
Amid the hush of May-day splendor”.[27]

It was the following autumn, however, before Maury’s wishes could be carried out. In bearing his remains to Richmond at that time, the family were escorted as far as the river, about a mile from Lexington, by the corps of cadets, the professors of the Institute, and a great many other friends who thus wished to show their love and respect for the great scientist. Some, among whom was Superintendent Francis H. Smith of V. M. I., accompanied the cortege as far as Goshen Pass. In going from Lexington to what was then the nearest station on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, one passed through this lovely gorge where the North Anna River forces its way through the mountains some fifteen miles from Lexington. When the cortege reached the Pass, the carriages were stopped and members of the family gathered branches of the rhododendron and laurel and bright yellow maple, and decked the hearse with them, as Maury had requested.

_Courtesy of Governor Byrd and of the Virginia State Chamber of
Commerce._

MAURY MONUMENT IN THE BEAUTIFUL GOSHEN PASS, ON THE BANK OF THE
NORTH ANNA RIVER, ERECTED BY THE STATE OF VIRGINIA IN 1923

See page 246]

The bronze tablet on the monument shown on the opposite side of
this page bears the following inscription:

MATTHEW FONTAINE MAURY

Pathfinder of the Seas
The Genius who first Snatched
From Ocean & Atmosphere
The Secret of their Laws.

Born January 14th, 1806
Died at Lexington, Va., February 1st, 1873
Carried through Goshen Pass To His Final
Resting Place in Richmond, Virginia.

Every Mariner
For Countless Ages
As he takes his Chart to Shape
His course across the Seas,
Will think of thee

His Inspiration Holy Writ

Psalms 8 & 107, Verses 8, 23, & 24
Ecclesiastes Chap. 1, Verse 8
A Tribute by his Native State
Virginia
1923

His Last Words
“Carry My Body Through The
Pass When the Rhododendron
is in Bloom.”]

They arrived in Richmond on Saturday, September 27. The burial in Hollywood Cemetery was private, Maury’s last resting-place being between the tombs of Ex-Presidents Monroe and Tyler, on a beautiful knoll overlooking the James River. “The lot we have in Hollywood”, wrote Maury’s son Matthew, “I like particularly because it faces the bright green country and overlooks the rapids of the James River, the sleeper there being always lulled by the murmur of running water, a sound which he so loved to hear”. Maury’s monument in Hollywood Cemetery bears the following inscription: In Memory of Matthew Fontaine Maury—Born in Spottsylvania Co., Virginia January 14th, 1806—Died in Lexington, Virginia February 1st, 1873—“All is well”, Maury. On another side of the shaft are these words: Entered the Navy of the United States 1825—That of the Confederate States 1861—Author of “Maury’s Sailing Directions” and “The Physical Geography of the Sea”.