Iowa's Famous General Grenville Dodge
(Editors note:
This excerpt comes from the book entitled Iowa Past to Present by Dorothy
A. Schwieder, Thomas Morain and Lynn Nielsen.)
... Grenville Dodge was a famous
railroad builder. In his lifetime, he helped build over sixty thousand miles
of track, including the Union Pacific, which linked the east coast with the
West.
Dodge was born in Massachusetts in
1831. As a boy, he delivered meat and clerked in a store. Later, he studied
to become an engineer. Engineers then surveyed land and planned roads and bridges.
In 1852, Dodge took a job with the Mississippi and Missouri Railroad (later
the Rock Island). At that time, railroad building had not started in Iowa. Dodge
surveyed a route from Davenport to Iowa City then across the state to Council
Bluffs. He finished surveying in 1853 and decided to live in Council Bluffs.
There he opened a store and a bank and traded with Indian tribes to the west
in Nebraska. He also did some railroad surveying west of the Missouri River.
When the Civil War began, Dodge joined
the Union Army. His skill at building bridges and railroad tracks helped to
move Northern troops more rapidly to the front lines where they were desperately
needed. In Tennessee, Dodge and his men won the praise of General Ulysses Grant,
commander of the northern army, by rebuilding 182 bridges and repairing 102
miles of railroad track in just forty days. Even President Abraham Lincoln asked
his advice on railroad construction. By the end of the war Dodge had been promoted
to major general.
After the war, General Dodge became
chief engineer of the Union Pacific Railroad. The Union Pacific was building
a line from Council Bluffs across the West to meet the Central Pacific Railroad,
which had started eastward from Sacramento, California. The two railroads finally
met at Promontory Point, Utah, and a great celebration was held. Americans could
finally travel from one coast to the other by train.
When Dodge had finished working on
the Union Pacific, he served one term in the U.S. Congress. Then he supervised
the building of new rail lines in Texas and the Southwest. After 1900, he even
helped organize a railroad in Cuba.
As a result of his railroad work and business interests, Dodge became a very rich an. He built a mansion in Council Bluffs that was one of the finest homes in Iowa. Dodge died there in 1916. Today, the Grenville Dodge home is open as a museum. ...