Frank Leverett
This is a true story about a relative, what we writers call a WIP, work in progress. I'm writing a book about him.Frank Leverett was born in 1859 in the town of Denmark, Iowa, in the southeast corner of the state. Iowa was a territory at the time but even then had a complex about comparison to Illiinois. Frank as a young boy found a fossil and had a species named after him, but loved geology best and started noticing things on the ground he walked on.
When he was five a guy named Agassiz came to visit Burlington, and the talk was all about him. Agassiz was the guy who made famous the theory that glaciers had covered the earth many years ago. Study of receding glaciers (30,000 years ago?) and their effects could be called Pleistocene geology. Anyway, this is what Frank became a specialist in.
Around the turn of the century, or a little before it, he had figured out that Denmark had actually been on the east side of the river back then. He explained it calmly and cooly and with the authority to back him up.
He was in the habit of collecting data and then making inferences from it. He was stumped by the family line, which has a gap in it on its way back through the revolution to colonial Boston.
He put himself up against that gap and it beat him - he never figured it out. I will both write a book about him, and try to figure it out.
posted by tom @ 9:28 PM
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