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Chief engineer of the Wabash and Erie Canal · Railroad engineer
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Jesse Lynch Williams was born 6 May 1807 at Westfield, North Carolina, into a Quaker family. He located part of Ohio's canal line in 1828 and in 1832, in his twenty-fifth year, was appointed chief engineer of the Wabash and Erie Canal. By 1835–37 Indiana had placed all of its canals, then its railroads and turnpikes as well, under his supervision — some 1,300 miles of public works. During the suspension of the canal works he was a Fort Wayne merchant and manufacturer (1842–47); he then served again as chief engineer of the Wabash and Erie from 1847 until its sale in 1876. He was chief engineer of the Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad (1854–56) and a director of the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago to 1873; a co-founder, with Allen Hamilton and Hugh McCulloch, of the Allen & Hamilton Company in 1853; receiver of the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad from January 1869; and chief engineer for the completion of the Cincinnati, Richmond and Fort Wayne Railroad from 1871. Presidents Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant successively appointed him a government director of the Union Pacific (1864–69); his cost report of 14 November 1862 fed the later Crédit Mobilier investigation, and the biographical sources stress that he served honorably. He died at his Fort Wayne home in 1886 and was buried in Lindenwood Cemetery; the sources in hand disagree on whether the date was 9 January or 9 October, and the year alone is printed.
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- § 06 — people of the record
Sources: Prabook (Appletons' Cyclopaedia-derived), "Jesse Lynch Williams"; Wabash and Erie Canal Association, "Williams Way"; Canal Society of Indiana.