An Engineering Visionary

By 1860 young engineer, Theodore Judah, had solved the problem debated for so long in Congress of how to get the railroad through the Sierras by way of the Donner Pass.  He envisioned a route with several tunnels through the mountains.

Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1826, Theodore Dehone Judah was the son of Rev. Henry Judah, pastor of St. Paul's Church in Troy, New York where the family moved when Theodore was just seven years old.  He was a withdrawn boy and at 11 years old was enrolled in Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in 1837.  A professor there by the name of Amos Eaton was an early railroad enthusiast at a time most people thought the railroad was just a silly fad.  Judah was strongly influenced by the professor in his career.

Judah left college after two years to become a surveyor's assistant on the railroad where he honed his engineering skills.  While working on a job in Massachusetts, he met the daughter of the wealthy John J. Pierce.  Anna and Theodore were married in 1847 and moved to the Niagara Falls area of New York where he worked as an engineer for the Buffalo and New York railroad line. 

Judah became a enthusiast  of a rail line to the Pacific even before he moved to California in 1854 where he was to build the Sacramento Valley Railroad.  There Judah become obsessed with the Sierra Nevada and began his study on how to build a transcontinental route to the East.

When he found the answer he and his investors - Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis Huntington, known as the Big Four - organized plans for the Central Pacific Railroad.   Judah avoided mention of a transcontinental railroad but he did point out the profits to be had from a railroad through the Donner Pass to Nevada mining camps.  In 1861, the Central Pacific Railroad Company was founded with Judah as chief engineer. 

After a trip via the Panama Railroad back to Washington, DC to lobby for government aid for his railroad, Judah died of yellow fever in 1863 with his railroad only in its infancy.

Next time...Building across America
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Today in Pioneer History:  "On April 9, 1859,  a 23-year-old  Missouri youth named Samuel Langhorne Clemens receives his steamboat pilot’s license. During his time as a pilot, he picked up the term “Mark Twain,” a boatman’s call noting that the river was only two fathoms deep, the minimum depth for safe navigation. When Clemens returned to writing in 1861, working for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, he wrote a humorous travel letter signed by “Mark Twain” and continued to use the pseudonym for nearly 50 years.