A Whale of a Tale & a Local Naturalist: The Charlotte Whale and Zadock Thompson

By Jennie Shurtleff

In 1849, railways were being heralded as the transportation of the future, and a new railway line was being constructed between Rutland and Burlington, Vermont. While digging in Beaman’s Hollow, in the town of Charlotte, a group of railway construction workers discovered some bones about 10 feet below the surface in a layer of blue clay.

The workmen assumed the bones were the skeleton of an old horse, and they continued digging. Fortunately, a local farmer named John Thorp was present. He was unconvinced that the skeleton was that of a horse. He approached the job foreman and was able to get the workers moved to a different part of the job site. Although many of the bones had already been removed and the skull of the creature had been partially destroyed by the workmen, he boxed up the bones that he could find and sent them to Zadock Thompson, a naturalist and professor at UVM.

Skull of the creature assembled by Zadock Thompson.

Photo courtesy of Geology Department Photo credit Bill DiLillo, ©UVM photo

Thompson visited the site and collected additional bone fragments. After analyzing the skeleton, Thompson concluded that it was an ancient fossil of an aquatic creature. Upon further examination and consultation with other experts, the skeleton was identified as that of a beluga whale.  The skull and wearing of the teeth indicated that the whale was an adult, and it was approximately 12 feet long.

While the discovery of such a skeleton is interesting in and of itself, it also furthered 19th-century scholars’ understanding how the topography of Vermont was formed.

One might wonder how did a beluga whale get so far inland as to be found in a field over 150 miles from the nearest ocean. The answer is that this area was not always a field. At one time it was deep under a body of water that is now referred to as the Champlain Sea.

Assembled skeleton of the beluga whale.

Photo courtesy of Geology Department Photo credit Bill DiLillo, ©UVM photo

The events leading to the creation of the Champlain Sea began some 200 million years ago when  the continents began to shift and stretch and a huge block of the earth’s crust dropped between two parallel fault lines. The end result was a canyon. This canyon was the start of what was to become Lake Champlain.

Around three million years ago, glaciers started to creep across the area that is now Vermont and travelled as far south as Long Island. In some places, the glaciers were up to a mile thick. These glaciers winded around mountains following the valleys which offered less resistance. As the glaciers moved over the land, rocks and boulders were trapped underneath them. The sheets of ice embedded with rocks grated like sandpaper against the land and reshaped it. As the glaciers began to melt and retreat, many of these rocks and boulders were deposited far from the sites where they had been picked up by the glaciers.

The huge glaciers that had covered the land had compressed the land making it below sea level. As the glaciers receded, salt water from the Atlantic Ocean flowed in, forming the Champlain Sea. This sea, which covered the Champlain Valley for about 2500 years after the retreating glaciers, covered about 20,500 square miles and was inhabited by a number of saltwater sea creatures.

Over time, the land –which had been compacted by the glacier – began to rebound. The elevation of the lake rose to above sea level and much of the water in it was displaced. What had been the Champlain Sea became a lake that is about 490 square miles. In time the salt water was diluted as fresh water flowed in from tributaries, which is why the resulting body of water – Lake Champlain – is a freshwater lake.

The discovery of the whale fossil helped researchers to understand how and why Vermont’s landscape changed following the last Ice Age. In 1993, the skeleton of  “Charlotte” (the whale from Charlotte) was named Vermont’s official State Fossil. The skeleton is currently on display in the Perkins Museum of Geology, at the University of Vermont. 

As for Zadock Thompson, the researcher who put the skeleton together… Zadock grew up in North Bridgewater, Vermont, on what is now known as Grandma’am’s Hill Road, an offshoot of the North Bridgewater Road. He was brother to my great, great grandmother, Eliza Thompson Shurtleff. According to family lore, as a child, he had been less interested in farming than his many siblings. While they were working in the fields plowing, haying, and raising crops, Zadock was under a tree looking at leaves and insects. Ultimately, while most of them opted to be farmers, he put himself through the academy located in Randolph by teaching in the Barnard and Pomfret districts. It was while teaching that he developed a severe illness that left him temporarily bedridden.

Zadock Thompson.

This obstacle became the impetus for a new career – publishing. Using his extensive mathematical skills he was able to make astronomical calculations necessary to compile an almanac, complete with weather predictions, as well as scientific phenomena, and advice for everyday living. His original works were low-cost publications which were hand bound by his two sisters, Eliza and Sally, who sewed the pages together.

Eventually, his works were compiled and expanded by the addition of descriptions of all the towns in Vermont, their waterways, as well as the State’s flora and fauna, geography, history, industry, and politics. 

His first book, published in 1824, sold extremely well and was lauded by other scholars. However, he had set the price so low, just a dollar, that it barely covered his costs. This experience did not deter him.

Thompson became a professor at UVM, and while teaching at UVM, he wrote a book entitled Youth’s Assistant in Practical Arithmetic. It was one of the first textbooks in the United States that used an inductive approach to learning, instead of rote memorization. This book, which was reprinted numerous times, brought him some financial stability.

In addition to publishing and teaching at UVM, he also served as a clergyman, the assistant State Geologist, the vice president of the Vermont Historical Society, and the State Naturalist.

In 1850, Thompson was invited to deliver a major paper on the Natural History of Vermont to the prestigious Society of Natural History. In Boston he delivered an address in which he articulated the tenuous relationship between human beings and the natural environment, explaining how animals that were once abundance had all but disappeared. Thompson advocated for the protection of endangered flora and fauna as well as the conservation of land and natural resources. While his thoughts on conservation, in historian Kevin Graffagnino’s words, “never coalesced into a comprehensive statement akin to George Perkins Marsh’s monumental Man and Nature,” Thompson publicly espoused the foundation for such ideas fourteen years before the publishing of Marsh’s book.

Detail from a page of Zadock Thompson’s History of Vermont: Natural, Civil, and Statistical in Three Parts.

Zadock Thompson’s passed away in 1856, at the age of 59, before Marsh’s book was published. Thompson left behind several seminal works that are still used and referenced by researchers nearly 200 years later.