YEATES, William Smith, state geologist, was born in Murfreesboro, N. C, Dec. 15, 1856, son of Jesse J. and Virginia (Scott) Yeates, and a descendant of Jesse Yeates, a soldier in the revolutionary war, and a captain in the war of 1812. He was educated at Randolph-Macon and Emory and Henry Colleges in Virginia, being graduated at the latter in 1878, and receiving the degree of A.M., three years later. He was a distributing messenger of the U. S. fish commission in 1879, and, after teaching school a year and a half, he accepted a clerkship in the tenth United States census in the division of fisheries statistics, 1880. In 1881 he was appointed to a position in the department of minerals and economic geology of the National Museum, Washington. Upon the organization of the Corcoran Scientific School, Columbian University, in 1884, he was made instructor in mineralogy; was promoted to the professorship in mineralogy in 1887, and he was given the chair of geology in addition in 1890. He resigned both positions on accepting the office of state geologist of Georgia in 1893. Since that time he has been steadily engaged in the duties of his office, and ten bulletins on the economic geology of Georgia have been published and others are in course of preparation. He is an expert in exposition installation, having prepared and installed the mineral and gem exhibits of the National Museum at the Cincinnati exposition of 1884, the New Orleans exposition, the World's Columbian exposition, Atlanta exposition of 1895, the Tennessee centennial, the Omaha exposition, the Pan-American and the Louisiana Purchase expositions. In 1884 he was married to Julia Wheeler, daughter of Maj. John W. Moore, state historian of North Carolina, and had one daughter and two sons. Mr. Yeates is a member of the Phi Delta Theta college fraternity, a Royal Arch Mason, a Knight Templar, a noble of the Mystic Shrine, a fellow of the Geological Society of America, a member of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Chemical Society. In 1891, he was a member of the International Congress of Geologists, in Washington.
(Source: National cyclopedia of American Biography. Vol. XIII. Published 1906.)