"It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting
shells than to be born a millionaire."
                                -- Robert Louis Stevenson
 
Then again, it may be the most fortunate destiny of all to be a
shell-collecting millionaire, like Truman H. Aldrich.
 
Aldrich, a relative of the New York Rockefellers, early acquired a taste
for collecting freshwater shells. He moved to Alabama after the Civil War
to start a bank, and later opened a coalfield and made quite a lot of
money. State Geologist Eugene Allen Smith persuaded him to take up the
study of Tertiary mollusks, which were sorely in need of attention. Aldrich
must have spent many happy evenings sorting shells; there was no television
then. He not only visited outcrops, but paid others (including Daniel
Webster Langdon) to collect for him, and built up one of the world's
largest collections of modern shells by trading and buying. While also
representing Alabama in Congress, one of the few paleontologists ever to
grace those hallowed and incorruptible halls.
 
Through what his eulogist called a "quixotic sense of honor", Aldrich lost
his fortune, but continued his work at the Alabama Museum of Natural
History as curator of paleontology until his death. If a man's inner life
can be read in his face, then photos show that he was content.
 
While he was still very much alive and active, Aldrich donated some of his
shells and shell books to the Johns Hopkins University and some to the
Geological Survey of Alabama/Alabama Museum of Natural History. The modern
shells are now at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and the Johns
Hopkins shells are now at the Smithsonian, but his name is still on all the
labels and bookplates, and it is honored.
 
I suppose that money allowed Aldrich the leisure time to do as he pleased
with his shells, and to amass a really large collection of them, not to
mention books, which have always been expensive. But I've read D. W.
Langdon's field notes, and they impart a sense of wonder and discovery that
Aldrich could have experienced only through the microscope. Langdon was
sent to canoe down the Chattahoochee River and discovered a major Miocene
site, Alum Bluff, just south of the Florida border. Langdon liked to sing
as he worked. He must have sung that day.
 
Andrew K. Rindsberg
Geological Survey of Alabama