Mark Sylvester William Jefferson (Mar. 1, 1862 – Aug. 8, 1949), pioneer of academic geography, was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, the youngest of seven children of Daniel Jefferson, a literary editor, and Mary Mantz. Jefferson entered Boston University in 1880 but left after three years to explore his passion for astronomy as an assistant at the National Observatory in Córdoba, Argentina. In 1886, he moved north to Tucumán, working as superintendent of a sugar estate. Returning to Massachusetts, he completed his undergraduate degree at BU in 1889 and married Theodora Augusta Bohnstedt in 1891. Together, they had five children.

After graduation Jefferson served as teacher, principal, and superintendent, in different Massachusetts public schools and earned a second bachelor’s degree in 1897, this time from Harvard College. While at Harvard, his scholarly interests shifted, and he began to study geography under the mentorship of physical geographer William Morris Davis, then the leading academic geographer in the United States. Awarded a master’s degree in 1898 from the Harvard Graduate School, Jefferson then returned to the public schools.

In the summer of 1900, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot invited Jefferson to join the staff of a unique experiment in education, the Cuban Summer School at Harvard, as lecturer on geography. Jefferson’s mentor, Professor W.M. Davis had recommended him partly because of his talents as a geographer, but also because he had direct recent experience of living in Spanish Latin America. Over the course of the program, he delivered eighteen lectures entirely in Spanish, and took the Cuban teachers on a number of practical excursions in the Boston region. A local newspaper suggested that “Prof Jefferson is the only lecturer so far who has been able to hold the attention of the teachers when assembled in Sanders Theater.” (Martin, 57).

There was some dissent. One of the Cuban teachers belittled his spoken Spanish and the arduousness of the excursions, a criticism that was aired in the Cuban newspaper La Discussion, and picked up by the Boston Herald and New York Post. But many others rushed to assure Jefferson of their support for both excursions and lectures. President Eliot expressed his backing for the young teacher’s teacher by doubling his stipend for the 6-week program from $250 to $500.

In 1901, Jefferson accepted a professorship of geography at Michigan State Normal College (now Eastern Michigan University) and moved to Ypsilanti with his family. He spent the next thirty-eight years of his life at Michigan State Normal College and taught thousands of students across several different courses. Jefferson continued to publish works that reached both the geography and education communities during his time as a professor, a practice he sustained until 1941. In that time, Jefferson single-handedly wrote more than 300 works, using a co-author only once. The topics of his works ranged from physical geography, to population, settlement, and the rural-urban divide, with Latin America and Europe at the center of his regionally focused research.

In his lifetime, Jefferson inspired countless students of geography, and was remembered as “a demanding but highly effective” teacher and an outspoken professional. (Jefferson, ANB)

After Theodora died in 1913. Jefferson married his second wife, Clara Hopkins, in 1915. Together, he and Clara had three children of their own.

In 1918, Jefferson was appointed chief cartographer of The Inquiry, an interdisciplinary group of scholars on leave from academia to aid the war effort by preparing maps to be used at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The Inquiry was headquartered at the American Geographical Society of New York. In 1939, Jefferson received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Council of Geography Teachers.

Mark Sylvester William Jefferson died on August 8, 1949, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. His contribution as a teacher is “distinctive in the annals of American academic geography.” (Jefferson, ANB). Thirteen years after his death Eastern Michigan University renamed its main library, The Mark Jefferson Library.


Further Reading

1. The college library at Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, contains the single largest collection on Jefferson, including several thousand letters, his lectures, field notes, diaries, slides, and photographs, and some of his personal library.

2. Bushong, Allen D. “Jefferson, Mark Sylvester William,” American National Biography (1999).

3. Martin, Geoffrey J. Mark Jefferson: Geographer (1968). Available online at https://commons.emich.edu/books/4/ See, especially, Chapter 3, “The Cuban Summer School, Harvard University, 1900.” https://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=4&article=1001&context=books&type=additional

4. Obituary: Isaiah Bowman, “Mark Jefferson,” Geographical Review, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Jan., 1950): 134-137