John Lucian Savage

The dossier on John L. “Jack” Savage, America’s “dam builder extraordinaire,” contains an incredible collection of ninety-plus noteworthy dams on which he was either the chief designing engineer or consulting engineer, among them such record-setting marvels as Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River, and Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River. In addition to notable U.S. dams, Savage was also involved in the design and/or construction of numerous hydropower plants, irrigation projects and canals throughout the western United States, and several major dams worldwide.

Of the hundreds of canals he engineered, the most impressive was the $38-million All-American Canal, the largest ever constructed in this country. During the first thirty-five years of his career, Savage was responsible for more than $1 billion worth of construction, which in 1938 earned him the nickname “billion dollar engineer.”

Savage’s most prominent international assignment, just prior to his retirement as chief designing engineer for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) in 1945, was the proposed Yangtze Gorge Dam in China (subsequently located a few miles upstream, called the Three Gorges Dam, and completed in 2007). When submitting his final report on the project, which was unprecedented in magnitude, Savage remarked that working on the Yangtze Gorge endeavor was “one of the greatest pleasures in my 40 years of engineering.”

Jack was born on a farm near the village of Cooksville, Wisconsin, on Christmas Day, December 25, 1879, to Edwin and Mary (Stebbins) Savage. His father was a successful farmer and his mother a gifted writer. In and around Cooksville, which was an unincorporated village located in the rolling countryside twenty miles south of Madison, Jack led the pastoral life of a farm boy. Most of his spare time was taken up helping his father with tedious farm work.

Jack’s grandfather, a prominent local surveyor, made Jack aware of civil engineering as a profession. Plus, all of Cooksville’s youth were familiar with the close-by meandering Yahara River. On it, and other local streams in the vicinity, were several small dams and gristmills, tiny but interesting nineteenth-century engineering wonders. Additionally, the solidly built brick houses of Cooksville, which differed from the usual frame homes of rural southern Wisconsin at the time, made a strong statement for building strong and to last.

Young Savage completed his first eight grades of education at the local country school, followed by two years at nearby Evansville High School. After that, he did something somewhat out of the ordinary, he attended the Hillside Home School, a highly regarded private academy operated by two aunts of one-day-to-be-famous-architect Frank Lloyd Wright—Jane and Nell Jones. The ladies stressed classical studies in preparing their students for college work.

In 1898, Savage’s family moved to Madison where Jack completed his junior and senior years of high school, graduating from Madison High. He then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (UWM) to pursue a degree in civil engineering. While there, for reasons of economy, Savage lived at home acquiring a reputation as a serious student who spent his time studying rather than socializing. To help make ends meet, he worked summers as a surveyor for the U.S. Geological Survey.

Jack’s only significant extracurricular activity at UWM was serving for three years on the staff of the school yearbook, The Badger. He was a good student, and his senior thesis, titled “The Accuracy of Various Approximate Methods of Calculation Stresses in the Members of a Two-Hinged Arch,” exhibited extraordinary scholarship. When he graduated from UWM in 1903, with a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering, he was eager to pursue a career in engineering designing grand structures.

Taking a position with the newly created U.S. Reclamation Service, Savage left home and headed west to Boise, Idaho, where he would reside for the eight years. His first assignment with the Reclamation Service was as a designer on the Minidoka irrigation project in Idaho’s Snake River Valley. The assignment required that he be in the field much of his time.

From 1903 until 1908, Savage worked mainly on the design of irrigation structures under the general guidance of Arthur Davis, then chief engineer of the Reclamation Service, and Andrew J. Wiley, a private consultant hired by the Reclamation Service for special jobs. Savage admired Wiley immensely, later stating, “A.J. Wiley taught me engineering.”

In 1908, Wiley secured a large private sector consulting commission to design the world’s highest dam at the time—the 350-foot Arrowrock Dam, a concrete gravity-arch structure to be built on the Boise River. Needing a skilled assistant, Wiley lured twenty-eight-year-old Savage away from the government. From the outset the two, who shared a common talent and similar personalities, established a good working relationship. Wiley, like his young assistant, was shy, averse to publicity, and reluctant to speak in public.

Despite his resignation from the government, Savage maintained a close and cordial relationship with the Reclamation Service in large part because much of Wiley’s practice was as a government consultant. Under Wiley’s direction, Savage designed, in addition to Arrowrock Dam, state-of-the-art structures like the Oakley Reservoir Dam, Salmon River Dam, American Falls Power Plant, Barber Power Plant on the Boise River, and Swan Falls Power Plant on the Snake River. Wiley’s engineering business extended well beyond just structures. He also was consulting engineer on numerous water-utilization projects by private interests in the irrigation and power fields, and Savage worked on most of them.

When Wiley died prematurely, Savage kept the company going. In 1914, the Reclamation retained Savage as a consultant to design the spillway gates for the Arrowrock Dam. Soon after, a reorganization of the Reclamation Service into its current shape as the USBR presented Savage with a new opportunity. The USBR set up a major design office in Denver, Colorado, in large extent because of its proximity to Washington, D.C., by rail service. The office was located in downtown Denver near Union Station with easy access not only to trains but streetcars and local transportation.

Frank E. Weymouth, the construction engineer for the Service on the Arrowrock Dam project and very familiar with Savage’s talents, soon became the chief engineer for the USBR’s Denver Center and, on June 5, 1916, he arranged for Savage to join the Denver office as its designing engineer at a yearly salary of $3,600. Even though the U.S. entered World War I the following year, Savage’s employment status was not affected. Even though still single, he was thirty-seven years old and too old for the draft.

Just as the war was coming to an end, Savage married Jesse Burdick “Mary” Sexsmith of Boise on June 1, 1918. Although it would be a childless marriage, his twenty-two years with Mary, which ended in her death in 1940 when he was sixty-one, “were among the happiest periods—personally and professionally—in Savage’s life,” according to his close associates. Ten years later in 1950, Savage married Olga Miner, widow of one of his colleagues James Miner, of Spokane, Washington.

The year 1921 was when Savage, in addition to his regular USBR duties, completed his first international venture as a consultant on the Barahona Dam in Santa Domingo, West Indies. Next among his significant international works was the Burrinjuck Dam in Australia. The two dams marked the beginning of many consultations by Savage with foreign governments on construction projects of a massive scale.

On some of these assignments, Savage was even charged with being the official representative of the U.S. government. About his global experiences, Savage stated: “Every country I have been in has been very enthusiastic about developing its water resources. Irrigation is one of the big hopes to lift the standard of living of the countries I have visited, and I have yet to find a place in the world where they produce more power and conserve more water than they can use.”

In 1924, Savage was named the USBR’s chief designing engineer. In that capacity, he supervised the design of dozens upon dozens of impressive concrete and embankment dams built by the USBR. Three of his main record-setters were enormous concrete structures—Hoover, Grand Coulee and Shasta dams.

Rising 726 feet above its foundations, Hoover was the tallest dam in the world for years. It is 660 feet thick at it deepest elevation and extends 1,200-plus feet along its crest, which has a pronounced upstream curve. It gives the impression that the dam relies on arch action to resist the hydrostatic forces of Lake Mead, which was created by Hoover backing up the Colorado River. In actuality, the dam’s dimensions are sufficient enough that the dam could have been constructed straight across the canyon and still have maintained stability. Located on the Nevada–Arizona border, thirty miles southeast of Las Vegas, Hoover Dam provides hydroelectric power for southwestern U.S. and stores water for domestic and agricultural use in Arizona and California. Plus, Lake Mead has become one of southwest America’s great recreational destinations.

The 550-foot high Grand Coulee, in eastern Washington, was the most massive concrete dam ever conceived when it was opened to the public in 1942. The reservoir behind it stretches upstream for more than 150 miles. Grand Coulee Dam, through its leading-edge power plant, provides much needed power and irrigation to the vast area surrounding it.

Shasta Dam, a 602-foot high and 3,400-foot long curved concrete gravity structure with an overflow spillway in middle of its face, was part of the Central Valley Project, the first large-scale USBR activity in California. Shasta captures and stores floodwaters that would otherwise flow into San Francisco Bay. Its water is then put to use irrigating extensive tracts of land in the lower San Joaquin Valley.

In addition to Hoover, Grand Coulee and Shasta, other important dams designed by Savage included Friant, Hamilton, Imperial, Kennett, Madden, Marshall, Norris, Parker, Owyhee, Seminole, and Wheeler, to name but a few.

During the design phase of Hoover Dam and Power Plant, Savage not only supervised the preparation of fifteen thousand contract drawings and thousands of pages of specifications, he also turned his attention to several new projects promoted by the “New Deal” programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

During Roosevelt’s first Hundred Days in the spring of 1933, Congress approved the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Conceived as an experiment in social planning, the TVA was designed to revitalize the depressed Tennessee Valley through a network of hydroelectric projects. One big problem was that the TVW at first had no designing engineers of its own. So Savage and his Denver staff were called upon to engineer the first two important TVA projects, the 265-foot Norris Dam and the 72-foot Wheeler Dam, both concrete gravity structures.

Simultaneously, Savage began planning for the most ambitious hydroelectric and water storage project ever constructed in the United States—the Columbia Basin Project—to bring the Columbia River water to the parched lands of Central Washington.

Up until the beginning of World War II, most of Savage’s career had been spent designing projects for the USBR. Increasingly, he was additionally asked to provide advice to other government agencies and foreign governments. He, for instance, spent considerable time in San Francisco in 1941, advising the U.S. Navy about a huge underground fuel storage project being constructed at Pearl Harbor. For international work during those times, however, getting to them was considerably more complicated and involved than going from Colorado to California.

Even for Savage to consult on projects with American allies required extensive red tape. When he, for instance, was asked to serve as a consultant to the Commonwealth of Australia on dams in New South Wales, Victoria, and the city of Melbourne, it required President Roosevelt to sign a special act on July 15, 1941, authoring him to undertake the mission. Savage’s mission to the Orient in 1944 to help China with the design of its proposed Yangtze River project took even more diplomacy because of the intense war activity present in the Pacific Theater.

After flying to China in May 1944, sixty-four-year-old Savage spent two months touring potential dam and power plant sites on the tributaries of the Yangtze in Szechwan Province. In August, the Chinese government asked Savage to expand his agenda by studying the feasibility of a project of utmost importance in the Yangtze Gorge below Chungking. It was quickly evident to America’s most renowned dam expert that the gorge’s limestone cliffs held unprecedented engineering possibilities that would support the construction of the world’s largest dam.

When Savage’s report on the project was finalized, a 750-foot-tall dam structure was the recommendation. It would to be designed by the USBR and constructed by Chinese laborers under supervision of U.S. engineers. The dam would be higher and more colossal than Hoover Dam and its power plant would produce five times the electrical power of Grand Coulee power plant. Before the enormous venture reached fruition, however, the Communists took over China and everything was put on hold.

After World War II Savage retired, most restrictions on international travel lessened, and Savage was able to more freely respond as a private consultant to requests for his expertise from around the globe. He was a consultant to several foreign nations in the design and construction of immense water resources projects, among them the Super-Dixence Dam in Switzerland, a series of dams and power facilities in India, and hydropower facilities and other structures in Palestine, Mexico, Ceylon, Spain, Turkey, Afghanistan, New Zealand, and Australia, Puerto Rico, and the West Indies.

The diversity and range of Savage’s work is reflected in how many other U.S. governmental agencies, in addition to the USBR, he worked for. Some of those assignments resulted in Savage providing crucial input into the design of the following:

Over his career, Savage invented or co-invented several devices used in hydraulic engineering, grouting systems, needle valves, and other hydraulic equipment. The procedures his team created for artificially cooling mass concrete structures of the magnitude of Hoover Dam have become the standard for projects around the world.

Savage also directed numerous analytical and model studies of structures such as Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee Dam. He was the author and/or co-author of several well-known USBR publications including, “High-Pressure Reservoir Outlets: A Report on Bureau of Reclamation Installations” and “Arch Dam Design Checked by Tests of Small-Scale Models.”

When Savage retired in 1945 at age sixty-five, while Shasta Dam was reaching completion, USBR Commissioner Harry Bashore stated, “Jack Savage in a very real sense epitomized the Bureau of Reclamation. He grew up with the organization. His extraordinary gift is the ability to bring a fresh mind to new problems in engineering. His approach is daring, but his plans are sound. Neither the necessity of building the highest dam in the world (Hoover) nor the requirement for construction of the most massive concrete dam so far conceived (Grand Coulee) dismayed Jack. He simply proceeded to design the dams, and they are the pride of the engineering world.”

Although others often give sole credit to him for the dams he was involved with as a consulting engineer and designer, Savage was always quick to emphasize the input, brilliance, and competence of the other engineers responsible. He was, bottom line, the engineer’s engineer.

Savage was the recipient of three honorary university degrees. In 1934, his alma mater UWM awarded him an honorary doctor of science degree. In 1946, the University of Denver presented him with an honorary doctor of science degree and, in 1947, the University of Colorado at Boulder gave him an honorary doctor of engineering degree.

For someone who shunned attention and honors, Savage received more than his share of prestigious awards. One of his more notable recognitions was the Gold Medal of the Colorado Engineering Council (representing all engineering organizations in the state) for Outstanding Engineering Service in 1937. When Savage was presented with the medal, USBR Chief Engineer Raymond F. Walter said of Savage, “I believe he is the most outstanding and widely known authority on high dams in the United States if not in the world.”

In 1944, Savage was presented with the Gold Medal Award of the National Resources Commission of Nationalist China. When he received the John Fritz Medal in 1945 for notable scientific achievement from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and three other major engineering societies, his citation read, “for superlative public service in conceiving and administering the engineering of mammoth dams both in America and beyond the seven seas.” One year later, in 1946, he received the Henry C. Turner Gold Medal from the American Concrete Institute (ACI).

Savage was honored by Look magazine in 1948 in a special article on outstanding professional and business leaders. Then a short time later, in 1952, Popular Mechanic magazine honored Savage by placing him in its Hall of Fame.

The Western Society of Engineers presented Savage with its much-sough-after Washington Award in 1949 for “unselfish public service devoted to the creation of monumental hydraulic structures utilizing natural resources.” In 1950, he was awarded the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Gold Medal, the agency’s highest individual award.

In 1958, Regis College of Denver selected Savage as one of seventeen recipients of its Civis Princeps (First Citizen) awards; then, in 1960, the western construction fraternity, The Beavers, presented him with its esteemed Golden Beaver Award. Savage was elevated to honorary member status in ASCE in 1941 and made a life member in 1942.

Active in several professional societies, Savage was the U.S. vice-president of the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD) during the years 1937–1939 and 1946–1947, and was on the executive committee of the U.S. Committee on Large Dams during 1946–1947. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Great Britain’s Institution of Civil Engineers, Colorado Society of Engineers, ACI, ASCE; and ASTM.

John L. Savage died on December 28, 1967, in Englewood, Colorado, a couple of years shy of his ninetieth birthday, survived by his second wife Olga.

Like many great men Savage was humble, self-effacing, and totally dedicated to his work, and his profession, and to public service. He left to posterity monuments as uplifting and permanent as any created in the history of civilization.