Left his mark in the US
Little could eleven year old Thomas Condon who was born in Ballinafauna between Fermoy and Coolagown and who emigrated with his parents to New York City in 1833, realise the path his life would take. Just short of twenty years later, Thomas graduated from a theological seminary and went on to become a man of some repute.
Having graduated from the seminary, he travelled to Oregon where he became a minister at The Dalles, an inland port and the largest city in Wasco County, Oregon. He was an advocate of ‘theistic evolution’ - a view that God acts and creates through laws of nature and was described as ‘a Christian Darwinist’.
He had an immense interest in the fossils he found in the Oregon area, discovering fossil seashells on the Crooked River and fossil camels and other animals along the John Day river. He subsequently corresponded with noted scientists and provided specimens to major museums.
Many of his discoveries are in the present-day John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in east-central Oregon which is managed by the National Park Service. The park is known for its well-preserved layers of fossil plants and mammals that lived in the region dating back up to 45 million years ago.
Also a teacher, Thomas Condon was appointed the first State Geologist for Oregon in 1872, but later resigned that post to become first professor of geology at the University of Oregon.
In a geology book published by him in 1902 (The Two Islands and What Came of Them), Condon wrote about two widely separated regions of Oregon that contain its oldest rocks, the Klamath Mountains in the southwestern part of the state, and the Blue Mountains in the northeast. The book attempted to summarise what was then known about the state's geology and to draw conclusions about its geologic past.
The Fermoy native has quite a number of establishments and monuments that carry his name to this day, including the temporary Lake Condon in the Pacific Northwest region of North America, formed periodically by the Missoula Floods (15,000 to 13,000 BC).
Condon Hall at the University of Oregon, which originally housed the geology department, was named in his honour, as were the Thomas Condon Paleontology Centre at the Sheep Rock unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument near Kimberley, Oregon and the Condon Fossil Collection of the University of Oregon Museum of National and Cultural History which was founded by him in 1876. The Condon Elementary School (1950-1983) in Eugene still stands as the University of Oregon's Agate Hall.
So, the lad from Ballinafauna who, most likely, received his early education through the Church of Ireland-run school system that dominated in the early 1800s, went on to leave an indelible mark in ‘the land of opportunity’ after settling there close on 200 years ago.
A lady by the name of Jennie Henchion Kolpak brought his story to the attention of By The Fireside and thought it was worth sharing.
"I am originally from Fermoy and live in Eugene, Oregon. This week I had the pleasure of traveling to Monument, Oregon along the John Day River for work. It is a far flung corner of this Earth. On the way I stumbled across the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center. I had learned a few years ago that Condon’s from Fermoy had settled in the area and the town Condon is named after one of them," she wrote.