Charles Ellet, Jr.

Charles Ellet, Jr. (1 January 1810 – 21 June 1862) was a civil engineer and a colonel during the American Civil War, mortally wounded at the Battle of Memphis.

Biography
Ellet was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, brother of Alfred W. Ellet, also a civil engineer and a brigadier general in the Union Army during the war.

Charles studied civil engineering at École nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, France, and in 1832 submitted proposals for a suspension bridge across the Potomac River. In 1842, he designed and built the first major wire-cable suspension bridge in the United States, spanning 358 feet over the Schuylkill River at Fairmount, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He designed the record-breaking Wheeling suspension bridge over the Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia in 1848, and a 770-foot suspension footbridge at Niagara Falls at the same time.

His other civil engineering accomplishments include supervising both the James River and Kanawha Canal in Virginia and the Schuylkill Navigation improvements in Pennsylvania (1846-47), and also constructing railroads in those states. Ellet developed theories for improving flood control and navigation of mid-western rivers. In 1849 he had advocated the use of reservoirs, built in the upper reaches of drainage basins, to retain water from the wet season that could be released during periods of low water to improve navigation; to some degree this also would tend to lessen the level of flooding during high flow. In 1850, the Secretary of War, conforming to an Act of Congress, directed Ellet to make surveys and reports on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers with a view to the preparation of adequate plans for flood prevention and navigation improvement. His report was very complete, and it exercised considerable influence on later engineering thought and navigation improvements.

According to A Naval History of the Civil War, Ellet was inspired by the accidental ramming of the SS Arctic by the SS Vesta, in 1854. In that disaster the Arctic was sunk by a vessel more than ten times smaller. He thought the accident demonstrated that steam power made it practical to re-introduce the naval ram as a weapon. When his proposal was rejected by the United States Navy he published a pamphlet Coast and Harbor Defenses, or the Substitution of Steam Battering Rams for Ships of War in late 1855.

In March 1861, the Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton appointed him colonel of engineers and tasked him with developing the United States Ram Fleet.

He was mortally wounded during the Battle of Memphis while on board Queen of the West, dying fifteen days later.

Ellet published a Report of the Overflows of the Delta of the Mississippi River, which helped to reshape New Orlean's waterfront. George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature fourteen years later, but it was Ellet who first noted in writing that the artificial embankments created an overflowing delta. It would be decades later that his assertions were taken seriously and used in flood control decisions.

His son Charles Rivers Ellet was a colonel in the Union Army.

Namesake
USS Ellet (DD-398), which was in service in 1939-46, was named in honor of Charles Ellet, Jr. and other members of his family.

Additional reading

 * Fowler, William M. 1990. Under Two Flags: The American Navy in the Civil War. Norton and Company. ISBN 0-393-02859-3