Michael Tuomey was born September 29, 1805, in Cork, Ireland, to Thomas and Nora Tuomey. He left home at 17 to teach in England before emigrating to America, where he tried tutoring in Pennsylvania and Maryland before enrolling at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, in April 1835 - earning a degree the same year. He went on to work as a tutor, civil engineer, and teacher in Virginia, eventually founding his own school in Petersburg. He married Sarah Handy in 1837, and had two daughters. His scientific reputation was serious enough that the prominent British geologist Charles Lyell visited him twice during those Petersburg years.
In 1844, Tuomey was appointed State Geological Surveyor of South Carolina, but left the post when the state legislature declined to fund the extended fieldwork the job required. Alabama made him a different offer: in 1847, the University of Alabama created a chair covering geology, mineralogy, and agricultural chemistry specifically for him, bundled with part-time state survey work. On January 2, 1848, he became Alabama’s first State Geologist, launching the Geological Survey of Alabama - a position the legislature had just created that same season. He served without compensation for four years.
His survey work began the following summer at Red Mountain and Jones Valley, and his 1849 Geological Map of Alabama and 1850 First Biennial Report of the Geology of Alabama were the first works to scientifically document the coal and iron ore deposits that would later drive Birmingham’s rise as an industrial center. His survey covered Blount, Jefferson, Winston, Walker, Marion, Lawrence, and Franklin counties. In Blount County specifically, he worked in cooperation with George Powell, who served as the county’s own surveyor for forty years and whose own 1855 “History of Blount County” is the primary source behind much of this site’s own research.
Tuomey died March 30, 1857, of heart disease and pneumonia, and is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Tuscaloosa. His students at the University of Alabama went on to become state geologists elsewhere across the Southeast.
Source: standard biographical record of Michael Tuomey, cross-referenced against George Powell’s 1855 “History of Blount County.”