Gerard Fowke

Gerard Fowke (June 25, 1855 – March 5, 1933) was an American archeologist and geologist best known for his studies of Native American mounds.

Born Charles Mitchell Smith in Charleston Bottom, Mason County, Kentucky, near Maysville, his parents were John D. Smith and Sibella Smith. He was the eldest of five children and the only one to survive to adulthood. Fowke's mother died before he reached ten years of age. He spent his childhood in Kentucky and was raised by his father and other relatives. In 1887, he legally changed his name to Gerard Fowke, naming himself after a prominent American ancestor of his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Fowke.

He worked as a bookkeeper and clerk in Nashville, Tennessee, before returning to Kentucky in 1873. From 1873 to 1876, Fowke was a student and farmer in Kentucky. In 1876, he moved to central Illinois, where he taught grammar school for two years. He then taught in Brown County, Ohio, before taking a position as a grammar school principal in Sidney, Ohio, from 1879 to 1881. In 1881, he took a class at Ohio State University in geology and archeology. After this course, he became interested enough in the subject to spend the rest of his life in the study of geology and archeology.

Fowke's career in science began in 1883 when he studied geological formations associated with the Wabash, Arkansas, and Missouri Rivers. The river he spent most of his time studying, though, was the Ohio River. During the course of his career, Fowke thoroughly investigated the geology of the Ohio River from its mouth to its source. He studied Flint Ridge for the Smithsonian Institution, detailing his findings in the "Smithsonian Report" in 1884. In 1886, he studied the archeology of the Monongahela River Valley of Pennsylvania.

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