Paul E. Hammond Collection

Paul E. Hammond dedicated his career to the geology of the Pacific Northwest, focusing on the eastern Cascade Range in Washington State. Paul amassed a collection of notes, samples, and data that was donated by the Hammond family to the Washington Geological Survey in 2025. This page describes the collection and ongoing WGS work to further catalogue and publish components of the collection. 

Click here to download the Paul E. Hammond Collection Phase 1 Inventory (2.1 MB)

Paul E. Hammond’s Life and Career

Paul E. Hammond spent more than 57 years focused on the geology of the Pacific Northwest, concentrating on the eastern Cascade Range in Washington State for the bulk of his research.

From Paul’s obituary in 2025:

“Paul was born in Oakland CA and grew up in the Piedmont neighborhood with parents James and May and older sisters Virginia and Phyllis. In 1947 he attended Brown University before graduating from University of Colorado in 1952 with a B.A. in Geology. While attending the University of Colorado he met Jean Anne Marples on the ski slopes near Boulder.

Paul served in the U.S. Army and Korean War from 1951 to 1953. Returning to California, he married Jean in 1955 and obtained an M.A. in Geology at UCLA in 1956. As a mining geologist with the Northern Pacific Railway between 1956 and 1960 Paul and Jean moved from St. Paul to Seattle where, in 1963, he completed his Ph.D. in Geology at University of Washington. In 1963 he joined the Geology Department at Portland State University and for over 30 years taught the fundamentals of geology and shared and sparked keen interests, observations, and passions.

Paul retired in 1994 as a Professor Emeritus but continued with relentless pursuit to map the geology east of Mount Rainier and to understand how this portion of the Pacific Northwest and Cascade Mountains formed. Often accompanied by Jean or other geologists and friends, and occasionally by his children and grandchildren, he would escape into the mountains to hammer rocks, draw sketches, write notes and collect data that he needed to create his beautifully detailed maps. His latest publications were in 2017 and 2018. People who were lucky enough to participate with him, or enjoy a Cascade sunset together, or hear him elucidate the geology underfoot, were likely to have captured some of his spirit.”

During his career, he was first or second author of 34 publications and reports centered on the volcanic history of the Cascade Range in both Washington and Oregon. And during his career, Paul maintained a relatively consistent and thorough system for his notes, samples, thin sections, analyses, and maps.

Paul spent his later years living in Portland, OR, where he housed a vast collection of the notes, samples, and data that comprised his entire career. Toward the end of his life, his family reached out to the Washington Geological Survey to determine if the Survey could ingest the collection. After some discussion, between the summer of 2024 and spring of 2025, the Hammond Family donated the bulk of the Paul E. Hammond collection to the Survey.

Scope of WGS Work

Due to the Collection’s size and complexity, inventorying and making available the full Paul Hammond Collection will be a multi-phased effort. The Survey’s long-term goals are to:

1. 2024 to 2026: Develop a preliminary Paul Hammond Collection inventory that is accessible to the public for future research that identifies portions of the collection and identifies its current physical location.
2. 2026 to 2027: Fully attribute and geo-locate geochemistry and geochronology data of the Hammond Collection into the appropriate WGS spatial databases
3. 2027 to completion: Fully attribute and geo-locate additional select components into the appropriate WGS spatial databases
4. 2027 to completion: Finish and publish Paul’s unpublished geologic mapping, using components from the collection to assist in their completion.

Between July of 2024 and June of 2026, WGS staff worked to assemble a preliminary version of the Paul E. Hammond Collection, with the aim of identifying individual pieces of the collection and identifying where those individual pieces may be located. The first year of the project involved inventorying, re-boxing, re-bagging, re-labeling thousands of physical samples into the WGS Core Storage Facility. The second year of the project was spent: developing standard location information for the samples; re-boxing, re-labeling, and inventorying thin sections, photos, geochronology analyses, geochemistry analyses using physical and digital records; and scanning, georeferencing, and inventorying field maps. Each component of the Collection underwent several rounds of quality control checks during inventory and attribution. All components were placed into one Excel Workbook for public dissemination, linked below.

Click here to download the Paul E. Hammond Collection Phase 1 Inventory (2.1 MB)

Paul E. Hammond Collection Components

The expandable sections below provide more information about the components of the Paul E. Hammond Collection. 

Sample Inventory

Approximately 7,000 physical hand samples were delivered on 19 pallets to the WGS core and material storage facility in Olympia, WA. In addition, WGS was provided with several sample inventories used by Paul. The authoritative workbook WGS used from the numerous worksheets included tabs for nearly every year of sampling performed by Paul. The schemas for each tab differed from year to year

A tabular schema was created to capture relevant information from the donated sample inventories into one cohesive worksheet. This WGS inventory accommodates Paul’s methods, shorthand, and organization that changed over the decades.

Upon receipt, donated samples were typically stored individually in brown paper or deteriorated plastic bags that had handwritten sample information on them. Samples were stored within ad-hoc cardboard boxes of various sizes, dimensions, and quality, along with large burlap sacks. As each sample was cross-referenced against Hammond’s field notes and sample spreadsheets, samples were repackaged in archival-quality plastic bags, assigned a unique identifier, relabeled with a consistent format, and re-boxed for long-term storage within the WGS core and material storage facility. And if needed and available, information from the field notebooks was transferred into the WGS inventory to ensure the geographic location was captured for each sample.

The WGS Hammond sample inventory captures most information about the sample, including the unique box identifier in which it is currently stored, such that samples may be retrieved in the future with relative ease. Additional information about the samples may be gained from accessing the field notebooks.

Approximately 1,800 donated samples were unable to be fully inventoried due to lack of information on the sample bag, the original sample inventory, or the field notes, including lack of geographic location information. These un-inventoried samples, with few exceptions remain housed within the WGS core and material storage facility on two pallets for future, in-depth research, with the hope that additional samples may be inventoried for use. Future data enhancements will occur as additional samples are located and processed.

During quality control, some re-formatting of data was necessary for consistency and clarity. Hammond’s field maps were scanned, and sample/field sites were digitized from those maps. This location information was used to refine, add, or correct sample location information within the sample inventory. Because sample locations in the original sample inventories were provided inconsistently in multiple formats throughout, location information was converted into latitude/longitude (in degrees, minutes, seconds) and Public Land Survey System (PLSS) notation for all inventoried samples.

Thin Section Inventory

WGS received numerous unsorted boxes containing thin sections. Some thin sections were stored in standard storage boxes, and others were delivered in home-made paper envelopes. All thin sections had a unique identifier engraved on a short edge of the glass thin section. Paul took copious notes about these thin sections, which were interspersed within the field notebooks that were donated to WGS.

A schema was constructed to catalogue and inventory the 2,596 donated thin sections compatible with the standard WGS thin section inventory schema. Each thin section was entered into the inventory using the identified engraved on the slide and if not already, placed into a standard archival thin section box. Each box was assigned a WGS identification number. Thin section boxes were then placed into a large container that also received a unique box identifier for ease of future retrieval. Each thin section was checked against field notes and the location of notes about each sample were recorded in the thin section inventory.

Thin sections are stored and cataloged within the Washington Geology Library in the Natural Resources Building in Olympia, WA. Future phases of this project will involve scanning the thin sections in plain and polarized light, full attribution for each thin section from field notes and other sources, and incorporation of this data into the enterprise WGS thin section database, which is available to the public.

Photo Inventory

This preliminary photo inventory of the Paul E. Hammond Collection was created to facilitate easier identification and locating of individual photos by staff tasked with scanning the photographs into the standard WGS photography schema during future phases of the project. Several additional fields were needed to fully characterize Hammond's info, as he used specific systems to tie photographs to locations, namely the Field Station ID. The Feld Station ID will be useful in relating the geographic coordinates from the Hammond Inventory to the photo locations.

WGS received numerous three-ring binders with slides already placed into plastic sheets for 35-mm slides. Each sheet was placed into a new 3-ring binder that was assigned an identification number. Each sheet was similarly assigned a page number. Additionally, WGS also received numerous small boxes/bags of loose 35-mm slides that were placed into numbered plastic sheets and into numbered binders. Information from each slide was placed into the inventory, along with the sheet and binder number for ease of future reference. Due to the large volume of photographs, only approximately half of the photographs (3,471) were inventoried during Phase 1 of the Hammond project; the remaining photographs need to be inventoried in a future phase of the project.

Note that several images are copyrighted and should not be distributed publicly. When known or suspected, a comment to that effect was placed into the Comments field, and these images will not be scanned and distributed in future phases.

Field Notebook Inventory

Ninety-seven of Paul’s binders and notes he used from 1957 to the mid-2010s were numbered and inventoried. The sample inventory was then updated with these numbers for easy reference to where the notes for any particular sample or field site may be found. Paul typically recorded field stations, samples, rock descriptions, outcrop sketches, travel logistics, mileage, weather, field partners, photographs, elevations, and location information.

Rock Geochemistry Inventory

WGS was provided more than 120 digital files that contain ~5,000 digital analyses records. WGS was also provided five binders (700 pages) of geochemical analyses, containing more than 7,000 analyses. A schema was created to catalogue the storage locations of these analyses (digital or paper) found in the notes and in the spreadsheets for ease of cross reference, capturing details such as sample number, field notebook ID number, page number, etc. No effort was made to remove duplicate analyses during this phase of the project. The second phase of this project will generate a fully attributed spatial geodatabase of Hammond’s geochemistry sample analyses for incorporation into WGS’s enterprise geochemistry database.

Geochronology Inventory

WGS was provided ~1,600 geochronology analyses. Of those, nearly 1,200 are in a digital format and the remaining paper records are stored in binders. The binder pages were numbered, and a schema was created to catalogue the storage locations of these analyses (digital or paper) found in the notes and in the spreadsheets for ease of cross reference, capturing details such as sample number, field notebook ID number, page number, etc. No effort was made to remove duplicate analyses during this phase of the project. The second phase of this project will generate a fully attributed spatial geodatabase of Hammond’s geochronology sample analyses for incorporation into WGS’s enterprise geochronology database.

Scanned Maps

Between published and unpublished geological quadrangle maps held in-house at the Survey and from the scanned published and unpublished maps donated by the Hammond Family, the area of unpublished mapping by Paul Hammond consists of approximately 700 square miles.

Digital files are stored on the WGS server network and will be reserved from public access. WGS plans to publish the unpublished geologic quadrangle maps in future phases of the Paul E. Hammond Collection project.

Field Maps

WGS staff scanned and georeferenced 292 field maps donated by the Hammond Family. These maps show inked-in field stations, structural measurements, and sample locations on 7.5-minute topographic base maps. These maps have been inventoried by quadrangle name and are available for download from links in the inventory spreadsheet.