John Bloomfield Jervis

One of most important civil engineers of the nineteenth century, John B. Jervis made numerous invaluable, history-altering contributions to the rapidly emerging field of American civil engineering. Recognized worldwide as an engineering pioneer who played a significant role in the development of America’s early transportation infrastructure, he was involved in the design, development, and operation of many of the country’s first important canals and railroads—and water supply systems.

Specifically, he was chief engineer for major sections of three landmark canal projects, including the historic Erie Canal, and was responsible for engineering and supervising construction of five of the country’s foremost railroads. For several railroads he also served in high managerial positions, holding the office of president for several years in one of them. In addition, he designed the first locomotive ever to run in America. In honor of his work on the Delaware and Hudson railroad and canal, Port Jervis, New York, is named for him.

Among his important nontransportation achievements was the design and construction of the monumental forty-one-mile-long Croton Water Aqueduct System, which served as New York City’s main water supply for fifty years (1842–1891). It was the most outstanding municipal water supply system in the United States when built and the prototype for countless later projects throughout the nation and worldwide.

Four years after the Croton was finished, Jervis was engaged, from 1846 to 1849, in designing and overseeing the building of the Boston Aqueduct System. It, like the New York project, featured state-of-the-art engineering breakthroughs that set the compass for the design of a myriad of other water supply systems.

So established internationally was Jervis’s standing as one of the United States’ engineering greats that he was befriended by several European civil engineering leaders, includ-ing England’s renowned Robert Stephenson. When Jervis made an extended four-month tour of Europe inspecting its latest infrastructure works in 1852—shortly after the completion of the Hudson River Railroad—he was Stephenson’s personal guest to observe the completion of the landmark bridge across the Menai Straits between Anglesey Island and the Welsh mainland.

In addition to being a top-notch, self-made, on-the-job-trained civil engineer, Jervis was an accomplished and shrewd businessman, industrialist, and community leader. He was also extensively involved in banking and real estate, often purchasing property near the projects he worked on. After retiring and returning home to Rome, New York, as the Civil War was wrapping up in 1865, Jervis organized the Merchants Iron Mill, which survives today as the Rome Iron Mill. Later in 1885, he founded Rome’s public library.

During his career, Jervis never demurred in giving his opinion on the proper way to educate and train civil engineers of the future—and what it took to be great, in essence. He stated, “An engineer must possess integrity and high moral character, and guard against committing himself until he is fully prepared to set forth his views clearly and decidedly.” He was likewise outspoken about engineers being well suited for more than simply engineering. Said Jervis, “The education of an engineer gives him superiority over the lay manager in all that concerns the maintaining, improvement, and operating business of a railway.”

John Bloomfield Jervis was born on December 14, 1795, in Huntington, New York, the eldest child of Timothy and Phebe Jervis. The couple’s other children would be three sons—Timothy B., William, and Benjamin; and three daughters—Ann, Betsy, and Maria. John was named after his mother’s favorite brother, John Bloomington, an uncle who would be an influential role model and business mentor—and one of the driving forces behind Jervis becoming a civil engineer of note. The emerging young engineer-in-training regularly frequented Bloomington’s extensive personal library, which included numerous up-to-date books on engineering, mathematics, and science.John B. Jervis (with permission, Jervis Public Library, Rome, New York)

Shortly after the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War, when John was only three, his family left Huntington—and the Long Island area—and moved three hundred miles west to Oneida County in central New York. Instead of living on the farmland he had recently accumulated, Timothy located his family in the village of Fort Stanwix so he could pursue his carpenter trade.

When the Jervises arrived in 1798, the outdated frontier army post—and the countryside surrounding it—was being invaded by hordes of transplanted New Englanders, and its swelling population had great need for builders and skilled carpenters such as Jervis. Among the New Englanders who had settled near Fort Stanwix (which would one day be renamed Rome) was a remarkable young man who would profoundly impact the direction young Jervis’s life would take—Benjamin Wright, ASCE’s “Father of American Civil Engineering.”

After remaining in the village for seven years, Timothy moved his growing family to the farm he had previously purchased on the outskirts of Rome. There, in addition to farming, he operated a sawmill. John and his younger siblings helped with farm work and the lumbering chores while going to school. In 1810, fifteen-year-old John finished his formal schooling and, for the next seven years, remained on the farm helping his father with farming and lumbering fulltime. By then, Timothy Jervis and Benjamin Wright were good friends, and the latter was prominently involved in the planning of a soon-to-be-historic canal project—the Erie Canal. It was the major event that would provide young John with the next phase of his education, and would change him from a farmer to a master builder of waterways and railroads.

After the War of 1812, rivers and canals were still the fastest, cheapest, and in some cases the only means of moving bulk freight and passengers in the United States. And when New York elected to proceed with the construction of the Erie Canal project, Wright was appointed its chief engineer. Needing trained axmen for a 1817 engineering party that was surveying the canal line through a cedar swamp, Wright contacted the elder Jervis, who recommended his twenty-two-year-old son. The engineer in charge of the survey party—Nathan Roberts, a stern, exacting person—took an instant liking to the young farmer. Impressed with Jervis’s industriousness, he instructed him in the use of leveling instruments and the making of related engineering calculations.

Upon his return to Rome in July 1818, Jervis was kept on and, fortunately, was again assigned to another well-led surveying party. Its principal engineer, David Bates, also appreciating Jervis’s work ethics and native intelligence, taught him even more about making engineering calculations, as well as the principles behind canal design. Bates’s tutorage greatly advanced the nascent engineering career of Jervis, who by then was reading and studying everything he could get his hands on from his uncle’s library dealing with engineering, mechanics, bridges, canals, and waterworks building.

When the construction work season opened in 1819, the twenty-four-year-old budding engineer was promoted to his first engineering position—assistant engineer—where he became acquainted with Wright’s brilliant formally trained assistant, Canvass White. Said Jervis of White, “He had the most strict engineering mind of any of this time.”

In the spring of 1821, Jervis was assigned the position of resident engineer for seventeen miles of canal, extending from Anthony’s Nose to Amsterdam. Much pleased with the assignment, he was determined to do his best, saying, “No effort of mine should be wanting to give satisfaction and at the same time improve my knowledge of engineering.” The project’s rugged terrain offered Jervis a number of new engineering challenges, including the design of several locks and other unique structures. In accomplishing this assignment, he very much benefited from having the man whose engineering ability he so highly respected—Canvass White—often looking over his shoulder.

Another significant promotion—his final on the project—came Jervis’s way in 1823, when he was made superintendent of a fifty-mile section of the Erie Canal, one-seventh of the entire canal. He held this position until the Erie project was finished in 1825.

Upon the completion of the history-changing canal project, Jervis was only thirty years old, but well on his way to becoming one of America’s most sought-after civil engineers. Trained and experienced in the field, Jervis’s engineering skills were acquired largely by observing his superiors and repeated application of new knowledge, supplemented by studying whatever technical books he could obtain.

Although his first job, after leaving the Erie, was another canal, it turned out to be much more. First hired to assist Wright on the Delaware and Hudson Canal, Jervis succeeded Wright as the canal’s chief engineer in 1827, after two years under his mentor. Even though there were no railroads in America at the time, Jervis proposed that one be incorporated into the project, and to everyone’s surprise, his proposal was approved. Since there were no working railroad locomotives in the country then, Jervis ended up designing one—the “Stourbridge Lion,” the first locomotive to ever run in America.

With his talents now expanded to railway as well as canal design, Jervis took on the position of chief engineer for the Mohawk and Hudson Railway (a sixteen-mile-long section later to become part of the New York Central Railroad). In 1832, he designed the “Experiment,” the first locomotive in the world to have a free-swinging, four-wheel front truck, which gave the vehicle greater maneuverability and enabled it to travel at an unprecedented speed of eighty miles per hour. This truck invention quickly became the standard American design for locomotives and was called the “Jervis” in Jervis’s honor.

In 1833, Jervis was appointed chief engineer of the ninety-eight-mile-long Chenango Canal, where he originated the method of designing artificial reservoirs to supply water to the summits of canals.

In June of 1834, while still employed on the Chenango project, Jervis married his first wife, Cynthia Brayton. He was thirty-eight and she was twenty-six. During their marriage, Jervis constantly went from one project to another without break and, because Cynthia’s fragile health prevented her from accompanying him, they spent much of their married life apart. She stayed with her family in Westernville (near Rome), and the two corresponded mainly through frequent letters, usually twice a week.

By the end of the eighteenth century, New York City had become the nation’s largest city, with its population exploding after the completion of the Erie Canal, which opened New York’s superior seaport to midwestern markets. But without a dependable potable water supply system, the full potential for the city’s growth remained stymied. The lack of an adequate supply of water—and an almost nonexistent sewage system—additionally caused the city to be at the mercy of fires and cholera epidemics. Not until the horrific cholera epidemic of 1832, resulting in the loss of 3,500-plus lives, however, were the “powers that be” in New York City motivated to actually do something about building a reliable water system. The answer ended up being a monumental and elaborate project—the Croton Aqueduct System.

Jervis was eventually put in charge of the massive venture in 1836, after its original engineer, Major David Douglass, a hero of the War of 1812 and a West Point engineering professor, was dismissed for lack of performance amid rumors of corruption. It was not a change that went smoothly or without grudges. For years after, those responsible for the firing, as well as Jervis himself, were the targets of much spite by a resentful and bitter Douglass, as well as his supporters.

The Douglass issue aside, the magnificent Croton project was an awesome construction project for its time, employing over four thousand workers and designed to carry seventy-five million gallons of water daily. The system included forty-plus miles of above- and below-ground tunnels and aqueducts, the Croton Dam, Ossining Bridge, Harlem River Bridge, and receiving, equalizing, and distributing reservoirs on Manhattan. One of the most impressive features of the project was the towering Harlem masonry arch bridge. With twelve graceful and imposing arches, it was reminiscent of the splendid masonry-arched aqueducts constructed by Roman engineers in days gone by.

In late 1838, while Jervis was in the midst of finalizing designs for the Croton, he and his wife learned they were finally going to be parents. Thrilled with the prospect of an addition to their family, both looked forward with great anticipation to the birth of their first (and only) child. But on May 9, 1839, when a daughter was born, only to live a few hours, their spirits were dashed. Five days later, Jervis himself was further crushed when the rigors of childbirth—and her baby’s premature death—proved too much for Cynthia and she too died, leaving the forty-four-year-old engineer a bachelor once again.

Jervis plunged deeper into his work, but those close to him—even Cynthia’s relatives—grew concerned about his well being, pleading with him to remarry sooner rather than later. After much urging he took their advice and, on June 16, 1840, Jervis married Eliza R. Coates. At thirty, she was fifteen years his junior, and would outlive him in a marriage that would last nearly forty-five years without any children.

After the Croton was completed in 1842, Jervis was engaged as a consulting engineer on a number of canal and railway projects. In 1846, he became the consulting engineer for the design and construction of the Boston water works, an assignment that lasted three years. While consulting for the Boston project, the ambitious Jervis also served as chief engineer for the Hudson River Railroad from 1847 to 1849. After resigning from the railroad in 1849, he continued as its consulting engineer.

The early-to mid-1850s were busy times for Jervis. He was chief engineer for the Michigan Southern, Northern Indiana, Chicago, and Rock Island railroads. He served as president for the Rock Island Railroad for three years, beginning in 1854.

In 1855, Jervis received the Democratic nomination for the position of state engineer, but was defeated. Shortly thereafter, he switched to the Republican Party, where he would remain and be fairly active for the rest of his life.

Jervis’s final full-time engineering position was as general superintendent of the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne, and Chicago Railway (PFW&C) from 1861 to 1866. After resigning from the company in 1866 to more or less slow down, the seventy-year-old engineer remained a consultant to PFW&C for a time, and did other consulting work as well.

In his partial retirement, Jervis returned home to Rome where he spent the last two decades of his life. In 1868, Jervis used his managerial skills and accumulated capital to build Rome’s Merchant Iron Mill. He remained a trustee in the company until his death.

In 1874, after Commander Thomas Selfridge Jr. of the U.S. Navy completed his survey of the Isthmus of Darien (Panama) in preparation of a report dealing with the feasibility of constructing a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, he sent a draft to Jervis for his review. In addition to commenting favorably about the project’s prospects for success, Jervis offered advice on general construction, railroad building, and the digging of tunnels and canals. Predicting that such a canal would one day be built, the seasoned seventy-eight-year-old engineer said, “The main point will be to put [the canal construction] in the hands of a reliable and intelligent commission.” President Theodore Roosevelt would do just that nearly thirty years later when the Panama Canal was actually constructed.

When he was eighty-two in 1878, Jervis received an honorary degree from Hamilton College, for lifetime achievements. Jervis’s undertakings were pioneering ventures and his projects filled with “firsts” and “untried” engineering principles and as such were “schools” for a generation of American civil engineers that came after him. Jervis had received his engineering apprenticeship not formally in college but under the tutorage of the likes of Benjamin Wright and Canvass White on the Erie Canal, and was one of that group of American pioneers who constituted a knowledgeable, intelligent, and ingenious engineering corps and had proved equal to the challenges of developing a new country’s basic infrastructure needs.

A prolific writer throughout his career, Jervis was the author of a wide range of publications. In his early-to-mid years, his writings dealt mostly with engineering, construction, and management: pamphlets such as “Description of the Croton Aqueduct” (1842); “Report on the Hudson River Railroad” (1846); “Railroad Property” (1859); and “The Construction and Management of Railroads” (1860).

His ongoing interest in banking and business were highlighted by his pamphlet “Currency and Public Debt of the United States” (1868), and two books: Railroad Property (1862) and The Question of Labor and Capital (1877). These writings were an outgrowth of his philosophy on life as much as they were manifestations of his ideas on business, construction, and engineering.

Jervis died January 12, 1885, in Rome, one month after his eighty-ninth birthday. His home and a large portion of his estate were bequeathed to the city of Rome for a public library. Included in his gift were memoirs, countless letters, scrapbooks, folios, manuscripts of books, his personal library, and one of the most complete sets of early railroad and canal reports and maps in existence—nearly six hundred engineering plans and drawings (some in watercolor), maps, and public documents.

Included in the insatiable reader’s personal library were more than 1,100 volumes. His extensive book collection reflected the diversity of the multifaceted individual responsible for its assemblage. As would be expected, many of Jervis’s volumes pertained to civil engineering, surveying, and related subjects such as American and English architecture. However, in addition, his library contained an exceptionally large number of publications on a broad range of subjects, including the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, agriculture, and religion.