Frederick Haynes Newell

Frederick Haynes Newell (March 5, 1862 – July 5, 1932), First Director of the United States Reclamation Service, was born in Bradford, Pennsylvania. He graduated in 1885 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and after field experience in Colorado and other states was appointed on October 2, 1888, as Assistant Hydraulic Engineer of the United States Geological Survey, being the first aide designated under Major John Wesley Powell to investigate the extent to which the arid regions of the United States might be reclaimed by irrigation. He was subsequently appointed Chief of the Hydrographic Branch.

At the same time, he actively assisted Representative Francis G. Newlands (later Senator) of Nevada, George H. Maxwell of California, President of the National Irrigation Association, and others in the preparation and public presentation of various Congressional bills, one of which by the personal efforts of President Theodore Roosevelt became the Reclamation Act when signed by the latter on June 17, 1902. Immediately after that date Mr. Newell was appointed Chief Engineer under Charles D. Walcott, then Director of the U. S. Geological Survey. In 1907 Roosevelt appointed him as a member of the Inland Waterways Commission.

Newell was born on March 5, 1862, in Bradford, Pennsylvania, a small lumber and mining town to father, Augustus William Newell, and mother, Anna M. Haynes. His father was an early industrialist and real estate mogul in Bradford. Newell's mother and Newell's sibling died in child birth a year after Newell was born. Newell would spend his childhood and teenage years with extended relatives, living with his uncle in Newton, Connecticut prior to attending MIT.

After receiving his BA in Mining Engineering, Newell returned to Bradford to work or his father. Frederick described his father as "always sanguine, full of entrancing schemes...He was surveyor, engineer and general all around man . . . . He bought and sold coal and timber lands and went into various ventures, characteristic of the time and place. Newell recalled in his unpublished memoirs "The people [in Bradford] were what might be called typical mountaineers and laborers in the lumber camps, rough, illiterate and with many queer old country habits and superstitions." Afterwards, he joined the Ohio Geological Survey in order to study oil–bearing rocks, but in 1888 Newell met John Wesley Powell, the head of the United States Geological Survey in Boston.

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