Theodore Judah
Theodore Dehone Judah was an American railroad and civil engineer who was a central figure in the original promotion, establishment, and design of the First Transcontinental Railroad. He found investors for what became the Central Pacific Railroad. As chief engineer, he performed much of the land survey work to determine the best route for the railroad over the Sierra Nevada mountains, which was completed six years after his death.
Early life and education
Theodore Judah was born in 1826 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of Mary and The Rev. Henry Raymond Judah, an Episcopal clergyman. After his family moved to Troy, New York, Judah attended Rensselaer Institute for a term and developed at a young age a passion for engineering and railroads.At age 21 Judah married Anne Pierce on May 10, 1849. Theirs was the first wedding in the then new St James Episcopal Church of Greenfield, Massachusetts.
Career
After studying briefly at Rensselaer, Judah went to work on a number of railroads in the Northeast, including locating and building the Niagara River Gorge Railroad. He was elected member of the American Society of Civil Engineers on May 1853; at that time there were fewer than 800 civil engineers in the United States. Judah was hired in 1854 at age 28 as the Chief Engineer for the Sacramento Valley Railroad in California. He and his wife Anne sailed to Nicaragua, crossed over to the Pacific, and caught a steamer to San Francisco. Under his charge, it became the first railroad built west of the Mississippi River.Throughout the mid and late 1850s, Judah was known as "Crazy Judah" for his idea to build a railroad through and over the Sierra Nevada, linking the Pacific Ocean with the Atlantic, a project which many people at the time considered impossible. On January 1857 in Washington DC, Judah published "A practical plan for building The Pacific Railroad", in which he outlined the general plan and argued for the need to do a detailed survey of a specific selected route for the railroad, not a general reconnaissance of several possible routes that had been done earlier.
Nominated in the 1859 California Pacific Railroad Convention in San Francisco, Judah was sent to Washington DC to lobby in general for the Pacific Railroad. Congress was distracted by the trouble of pre-Civil War America and showed little interest. He returned noting that he had to find a specific practical route and some private financial backing to do a detailed engineering survey.
In 1860, he set out to make general reconnaissance, using a barometer to measure elevation, of several possible routes through the Sierra. That Fall, with the help of Daniel W. Strong, a storekeeper in Dutch Flat, California, Judah found a practical trans-Sierra railroad route. In November 1860, Judah published "Central Pacific Railroad to California", in which he declared "the discovery of a practicable route from the city of Sacramento upon the divide between Bear River and the North Fork of the American, via Illinoistown, Dutch Flat, and Summit Valley to the Truckee River". He advocated the chosen Dutch Flat-Donner Pass route as the most practical one with maximum grades of one hundred feet per mile and 150 miles shorter than that recommended in governmental reports. Whereas most of the Sierra was double-ridged, meaning two summits separated by a valley, Donner Pass was not and thus more suitable for a railroad. From Dutch Flat, the Pacific road would climb steadily up to the Pass before winding down steadily following the Truckee River out of the mountains into the Great Basin of Nevada.
Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR)
Failing to raise funds for the Central Pacific project in San Francisco, Judah succeeded in signing up four Sacramento merchants, later known as the "Big Four": Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker. On June 28, 1861, the Central Pacific Railroad was incorporated with Judah as the chief engineer. At this point in time, Judah had the CPRR backing to survey the route over the Sierra Nevada along which the railroad was to be built during the late 1860s as well as barometric reconnaissance of two other routes, which turned out to be inferior. In a report dated October 1, 1861, Judah discussed the results of the survey, the merits of the chosen Dutch Flat-Donner Pass route, and the estimated costs from Sacramento to points as far as Salt Lake City. On October 9, 1861, the CPRR directors authorized Judah to go back to Washington DC, this time as the agent of CPRR, to procure "appropriations of land and U.S. Bonds from the Government to aid in the construction of this road". The next day, Judah published a strip map, 30 inches tall by 66 feet long, of the proposed alignment of the Central Pacific Railroad. On October 11, 1861, Judah boarded a steamer in San Francisco headed for Panama.At Washington DC, Judah began an active campaign for a Pacific Railroad bill. He was made the clerk of the House subcommittee on the bill and also obtained an appointment as secretary of the Senate subcommittee. On July 1, 1862, President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act into law, which authorized the issuance of land grants and U.S. bonds to CPRR and the newly chartered Union Pacific Railroad for the construction of a transcontinental railroad. Judah then went to New York to order supplies and sailed back to California on July 21, 1862, having accomplished his mission in less than a year.
Death
Judah died of yellow fever on November 2, 1863. He contracted the disease in Panama on a voyage with his wife to New York City, apparently becoming infected during their land passage across the Isthmus of Panama. He was traveling to New York to seek alternative financing to buy out the Big Four investors. Anne took his body back to Greenfield, Massachusetts, where he was buried in the Pierce family plot in the Federal Street Cemetery. He died before his dream of a transcontinental railroad could be completed.Legacy and honors
Within days of Judah's death, the CPRR's first locomotive, Gov. Stanford, made a trial run over the new railroad's first 500 feet of track in Sacramento, CA.- The CPRR named one of its steam locomotives after him. Judah crossed paths with the 19-ton locomotive bearing his name while on his way to New York.
- Mount Judah, an 8,245-foot peak in Placer County, CA, located adjacent to Donner Peak and Mount Lincoln in the Sierra Nevada Tahoe National Forest, was formally named for Judah on October 18, 1940 by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. Running through the mountain about 1,000 below the summit is the 10,322-foot long single track UPRR Sierra Grade Tunnel #41 which was opened in 1925 and carries both UPRR freight and Amtrak passenger trains in both directions over Donner Summit between Soda Springs and Eder. This route bypasses the original, now abandoned 1868 CPRR "Summit Tunnel" surveyed by Judah which is located a mile to the north and had remained in service until 1993.
- Judah Street in San Francisco and its N-Judah Muni streetcar line are named after him.
- Memorial plaques dedicated to him have been erected in Folsom and Sacramento, California
- Elementary schools in Sacramento and Folsom are named after Judah.