Holmes

Maine from Massachusetts, Holmes took a
prominent part in the Brunswick Convention of
1816. Though not the author of the curious
method of counting votes called "Holmes' arith-
metic," he signed the report setting it forth and
received blame and ridicule for the argument
that five-ninths of the aggregate majorities of
the town corporations constituted the five-ninths
of the legal votes of Maine required by the Mas-
sachusetts law authorizing separation (To the
People of Maine, 1816). Besides acting as chair-
man of the committee which drafted the Maine
constitution, he did much to put through Con-
gress the bill creating the new state. His pam-
phlet (Mr. Holmes' Letter to the People of
Maine, Washington, Apr. 10, 1820), wherein he
argued that any restriction upon the admission
of Missouri would be unconstitutional, was his
defense against the opposition of many citizens
of Maine to entangling the admission of Maine
with the question of slavery extension. Elected
senator from Maine in 1820, he retired in 1827,
only to be elected the next year to fill the unex-
pired term of Albion Keith Parris. In 1833 he
again retired to the practice of law.

In 1824 Holmes supported Crawford as a can-
didate for the presidency. Never a Jacksonian,
he transferred his allegiance to Clay and later to
the Whig party. In the upper house he defended
Foot's resolution, which led to the Webster-
Hayne debate, and was active in opposing Van
Buren's nomination as minister to Great Britain
in 1831. Blair called him the "Thersites of the
Senate." In 1836 and 1837 he represented the
town of Alfred in the state legislature. Appoint-
ed in 1841 United States attorney for the Maine
district by President Harrison, he held the office
until his death in Portland in 1843. He had pub-
lished in 1840 a volume entitled The Statesman,
designed to illustrate the "Principles of Legis-
lation and Law." He was twice married: on
Sept 22,1800, to Sally Brooks of Scituate, Mass.,
who died Dec. 6, 1835, and on July 31, 1837, to
Caroline F. (Knox) Swan, youngest daughter
of Gen. Henry Knox, with whom he spent his last
years in the mansion at Thomaston, Me. Though
he had been notoriously intemperate during the
earlier years of his career, late in life he took an
active part in the temperance movement.

[Win. Willis, A Hist, of the Law, the Courts, and the
Lawyers of Me. (1863), is the source of the accounts
in J. A. Vinton, The Giles Memorial (1864), and in
the Biog. Encyc. of Me. of the Nineteenth Century
(1885), ed. by H. C Williams. See also H. S, Burrage,
Me. in the Northeastern Boundary Controversy (1919) ;
and the Law Reporter, Aug. 1843. There are two vol-
umes of letters to Holmes in the Maine Hist. Soc.]

R.E.M.

Holmes

HOLMES, JOSEPH AUSTIN (Nov. 23,
i859-July 12, 1915), mining engineer, father of
the United States Bureau of Mines, was born in
Laurens, S. C, the son of Rev. Z. L. Holmes, a
Presbyterian minister with scientific tastes, and
of Catherine (Nickles) Holmes. His education
was received in the local schools and at Cornell
University, where he was graduated in 1881,
having specialized in agriculture and science.
In the following year he was appointed professor
of geology and natural history at the University
of North Carolina, where he remained for ten
years and where he continued to lecture after he
was appointed state geologist in 1891. In addi-
tion to his geological studies he showed political
ability by inaugurating a campaign for the build-
ing of good roads by the use of convict labor and
by increased taxes. While still state geologist,
in 1903-04 Holmes was put in charge of the de-
partment of mines and metallurgy at the Louisi-
ana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. In con-
nection with this appointment he took up the test-
ing of fuels and structural materials, conducting
his demonstrations with such skill that he was
put in charge of testing laboratories for the
United States Geological Survey. The waste of
mineral resources was given much attention in
the Roosevelt administration, and Holmes be-
came prominent in the conservation movement
By 1907 the work with which he was associated
had become so important that it was organized
as the technological branch of the Survey, with
Holmes as its chief. About this time his atten-
tion was directed, by a series of disasters, to the
investigation of accidents in mines. Explosions
and fires in coal mines were taking terrible toll
of life, and there was serious need for scientific
study and educational propaganda. The techno-
logical branch was expanded into the United
States Bureau of Mines in 1910, and Holmes,
who had worked for the reorganization, was se-
lected from several candidates as director. With
high ambitions for the success of the new bu-
reau, he took up earnestly the problem of the dis-
graceful mortality in American mining. A model
mine for testing explosions was developed at
Bruceton, Pa. Holmes contended that dust from
bituminous coal is dangerous by itself, a tenet
contrary to the old belief that coal dust could not
explode without gas. At the first national mine-
safety meeting, organized in Pittsburgh in Octo-
ber 1911, mine operators were impressed by the
demonstrations. Federal and state rescue sta-
tions were established in the coal and metal min-
ing regions, and a number of railroad cars were
equipped as movable safety and rescue stations.
Holmes made popular the slogan "safety first"

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