What educational background did the railroad engineers and surveyors have?
Some such as S.H. Long and G.B. McClellan were former Army topographical engineers who had studied at West Point; Theodore Judah attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1837; L.M. Clement studied engineering at McGill University in Montreal ; UPRR chief engineer Grenville Dodge attended Norwich University in Vermont then traveled west to work on the Illinois Central Railroad and came to Iowa in 1852 as a surveyor on the Mississippi and Missouri Railroad; others were either self taught or “apprenticed” with other engineers and learned through on the job training such as S.S. Montague who began his career at age 22 with the Rock Island and Rockford Railroad as a surveyor’s assistant. Courtesy Bruce C.
