As you see, I am not totally engrossed in Jamestown, but my question did grow out of our trip to Lehigh University a weekend or so ago.  I did not realize it is primarily an Engineering School, and a private one at that.  That caused me to think about MIT and RPI and I think there was one at Norwalk or Norwich CT which were also a private Engineering School, formed in the decades before the Civil War.  All this was obviously response to a need for trained engineers in some industry or other.

I am not aware of ANY engineering schools in the South prior to the advent of the Land-Grant colleges in the 1880's -- Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, etc.  My question is WHERE did southern enterprises like Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, the Gosport Shipyard in Norfolk, the powder factory in Augusta, GA, the iron and steel complex in Alabama, etc. get engineers, or whatever they called the people who passed for such at the time?   The US Military Academy? imported from Europe? from the North?  Self Taught?  A formal or informal guild of engineers?  All of the above?

I note that Charles Ellet, Jr., builder of many bridges and I think of a Union ironclad fleet in the Civil War (so therefore no doubt a Northerner) took it upon himself to go to Paris to study at the Ecole des Ponts et Chausses where he joined French Engineering students. 

Just wondering.

Randy Cabell
Ga Tech '54


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