Rediscovering Miles Rock

Miles Rock’s consequential life is meticulously cataloged in dozens of well-kept journals that still contain the plant clippings he pressed between pages filled with his neat, cursive handwriting. His Civil War uniform, its brass buttons embossed with eagles, is worn, though intact. The letters he wrote from the battlefields to friends and family offer moral advice and observations about 19th-century American life. His finely detailed surveys and maps of Mexico border territory and Guatemala that helped determine the disputed boundary between the countries are folded in a leather-bound book that bears his name and the year 1895.

Miles Rock—an intrepid naturalist, civil engineer, astronomer and Civil War soldier—was one of five men who composed Lehigh’s first graduating class, the Class of 1869. Born in Pennsylvania, his life journey began in the farmlands of Lancaster County, continued through the Civil War, included time in the 1st Pennsylvania Reserve Volunteer Corps and U.S. Signal Corps, and led to a distinguished career that took him throughout the Americas to the West Indies, Guatemala and elsewhere.

More than 120 years after his death, Rock’s relics and records have now made their way to Lehigh, where they will be preserved and made available for research. His great-great-grandsons, brothers David Grace and Chris Grace, recently donated enough material to fill a large cargo van—five steamer trunks packed by Rock’s son following his death, along with six bankers boxes, a suitcase, two garment boxes and several rolled wall maps—to the Lehigh University Libraries Special Collections.

“These are materials that tell a full story ... This is just an amazing collection with so much research potential,” said Lois Black, the curator for Lehigh’s Special Collections.

Rock is the only alum to have served in the Civil War, and it is the first time the university had received a Civil War uniform, she said.

“The insights the collection will provide into the life of one of the first self-made Lehigh graduates, and the first Lehigh Alumni Association president, are truly priceless,” said Boaz Nadav Manes, Lehigh University librarian. “We feel extremely fortunate to receive such an intimate gift from his descendants.”

Some of the trunks hadn’t been touched since Rock’s death in 1901. One of them, bearing his initials, also includes a tattered sticker for the Hotel Grunewald in New Orleans—now The Roosevelt New Orleans. The slots inside are filled with newspapers from Rock’s lifetime.

There are also mementos from his time at Lehigh, including an “autograph book” signed by friends like Henry Sturgis Drinker, a mechanical engineer, lawyer and author who went on to become Lehigh’s fifth president.

A Special Connection to Lehigh

Rock was devoted to Lehigh, even naming his son Alfred Mayer after his favorite professor Alfred Marshall Mayer, who was in charge of what was then the Department of Astronomy, David said.

“We were really hopeful we would find a place where it wouldn’t get lost in a larger collection or some remote collection where no one knew about it,” Chris said. “Lehigh was a natural first choice.”

Lehigh also made Rock’s impressive career possible, David added.

“It’s where he was introduced to science, astronomy and surveying,” he said.

Rock was the eighth of 10 children. The majority of men during his time were farmers who never left the county they were born in, according to the blog Roots and Wings Research by Kristin Wenger, a Lititz-based professional genealogist and educator, who is a descendant of Rock’s sister, Caroline. Rock’s achievements were even more remarkable considering his father, Peter, died when Rock was just 5 years old.

Because of this, the children were “farmed out” as apprentices or farm laborers to live with other families, Wenger says in her blog. While education beyond the eighth grade was extremely rare in 1850s Lancaster County, she writes, Rock somehow managed to attend college and launch his remarkable career. When Rock died in Guatemala following a bout of severe food poisoning, his son Alfred retrieved the items from Rock’s home in the Central American country and brought them back to the family home in Washington, D.C. Alfred died three years later in a mining accident in Mexico, and his sister Amy Cordoba (Rock) Ransome assumed possession of the items until her death in 1942.

After a few generations, they ended up in David and Chris’s childhood home in upstate New York. Every time a National Geographic Special came on television, their mother would remind the family that there was a scientist and adventurer in their past—Miles Rock.

Still true to his alma mater, he became the first president of the newly formed Lehigh Alumni Association that same year. A few years later, he was appointed an honorary alumni trustee.

In 1874, Rock worked with Commander F.M. Green of the U.S. Navy in determining latitudes and longitudes by means of submarine cables in the West Indies and Central America. He also served as a field astronomer in the U.S. geographical surveys west of the 100th meridian under Lt. George M. Wheeler of the U.S. Engineers and determined latitudes and longitudes in several western states and territories.

Rock also worked as an astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. In December 1882, he was detailed to aid Professor Lewis Boss in the observation of the transit of Venus in Chile. On the recommendation of the U.S. government, Rock was appointed astronomical engineer for Guatemala in 1883, and for 15 years he served as chief of the Guatemala Boundary Commission, charged with the duty of determining and locating the disputed frontier between Guatemala and Mexico, according to his obituary.

His work resulted in Guatemala retaining valuable land in the Petén region. Because of this, Rock was highly esteemed in Guatemala. Online maps still show a neighborhood in Guatemala City called “Colonia Miles Rock.”

The letters and other items from the collection will provide many research opportunities for students and scholars alike, said Monica Najar, an associate professor of history at Lehigh.

“The Miles Rock collection is a fantastic opportunity for Lehigh students to get up close and personal with the Civil War,” she said. “Beyond seeing Rock's uniform, students and scholars will be able to read about his unique path to handling the traumas, but also the strange opportunities, in the war.”

For example, the war offered Rock the chance to clerk and eventually teach flag signaling, work that offered him some safety, Najar said. At the same time, Rock had experiences typical of other enlisted men, and his letters offer a vivid window into the hardships of war, such as missed rations and bitter weather. They also show the camaraderie of camp life.

“The experience of being so close to the documents and material culture of the war is both exciting and critical to our history classes,” Najar said. Having access to such materials is likely to leave a lasting impression on student researchers, Black added.

During his time in the army, Rock developed a serial number system to catalog each letter he sent and received. Long after the war, descendants of the recipients sometimes returned the letters they had saved, David said.

Rock also used a letter copy book which was like an early version of the Xerox. The book consisted of tissue-thin pages that could be damped and pressed onto a letter to make a copy. Rock was also known to keep a copy of “Gray’s Manual of Botany” in his knapsack and meticulously recorded and pressed the plants he found during his leisure time at camp, according to his obituary.

“In his own writings, Miles Rock doesn't talk much about bullets, shells and bombs. He was more likely to talk about the varieties of wildflowers he found on the battlefields than any human carnage he witnessed there,” David said. “That said, surviving records prove that he faced enemy fire in direct action.”

A journal from Rock’s senior year at Lehigh describes his day-to-day life, much of which revolved around the Friedensville Zinc Mine. “At 3:30 the great boulder fell into the pit at the mines,” Rock wrote on Feb. 20, 1869. “I was surveying under the bank north of it to learn how near the mines were to it as a precaution, but it came sooner than expected.” In another entry from Dec. 25, 1869, Rock describes a grand Christmas dinner that included turkey, duck and oysters.

The library, in partnership with a project archivist, will spend six months to a year cataloging the materials, a process that includes examining Rock’s letters to determine the sender and when the letters were received, and reviewing each diary to determine when and where they were written and their context.

“This is a snapshot of a person involved in science. The completeness of that snapshot is something very few collections would allow people to see,” David said.

Brothers Sam Small and Wes Small of The Horse Soldier, a family-owned antique store in Gettysburg that specializes in military antiques, particularly those from the Civil War, were among the experts to examine the collection. Sam Small plans to review the Civil War letters.

“It will help figure out what he was doing during the war,” Small said. “Unfortunately, a lot of times, you never know what people did. I think the letters will tell us a great deal about that.”

Both Grace brothers have a special connection to history and education. Chris works in the art industry and designs displays for galleries and museums, while David is an independent scholar. In addition to the collection, the brothers provided generous support to help with digitizing, cataloging and archiving the collection.

Chris believes the collection will be of importance to those studying the history of Central and South America, colonialism, the history of science and the Civil War. He’s excited to see what transpires when more people have a chance to study the collection.

“It’s kind of the final family step in our responsibility to him,” Chris said.