Frederick W. von Egloffstein

Frederick Wilhelm von Egloffstein
Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Egloffstein as colonel of the 103rd New York Volunteer Infantry, 1861-1862
Born	May 18, 1824 Egloffstein, Kingdom of Bavaria
Died	February 18, 1885(1885-02-18) (aged 60) Dresden, Kingdom of Saxony

Frederick Wilhelm von Egloffstein (18 May 1824 – 18 February 1885) was a German-born military man, explorer, mapmaker, landscape artist and engraver. He was the first person to employ ruled glass screens, together with photography, to produce engravings.

Born Friedrich Ernst Sigmund Kamill von Egloffstein at Egloffstein, the fifth and last son of Baron Wilhelm von Egloffstein and his second wife Karoline marquise de Montperny. The Egloffsteins have their ancestral castle after which they are named, overlooking the village of the same name. They are regarded as Imperial barons of Franconia, and they were Protestants. Baron Wilhelm von Egloffstein had served in the Prussian army as well as in the court of the prince of Baden at Karlsruhe before taking service as a Bavarian forestry officer in 1811 where he served as Master of the Royal Bavarian Forests.

Baron F. W. von Egloffstein was serving in the Prussian army as a lieutenant in the 5th (von Neumann or First Silesian) Battalion of Rangers (Jäger) in Görlitz, Prussian Silesia, in 1846 when he left for the United States. He would resign his commission in 1847 but briefly return to Germany in December 1848 to marry Irmgard von Kiesenwetter in Reichenbach, Oberlausitz, then Prussian Silesia, today Saxony. His wife came from a prominent family of the Kingdom of Saxony. There was a daughter in St. Louis, Missouri who died early; his eldest son Friedrich, born in Dresden on 6 June 1855, would marry in Iowa; a second son, Philip was born in 1867 and baptized in New York. A daughter, Magdalena Elisabeth, was born in New York on 15 October 1871 and baptized on 15 June 1873.

On August 31, 1846, F. W. von Egloffstein arrived in Baltimore, accompanied by his future brother-in-law Ernst von Kiesenwetter, with a stated intention of going to Texas. He is recorded between December 1846 and April 1847 in New Orleans as a partner of C. A. Hedin from Sweden, and from May 1848 in St. Louis, Missouri. In New Orleans he produced several posters of houses for sale, preserved in the Orleans Parish Archive. By 1852 he was surveying properties and publishing maps as a partner of one G. Zwanziger, including a map of Bellefontaine Cemetery and another of western St. Louis County as a promotion for the Pacific Railroad of Missouri. He cultivated the friendship of the pioneer botanist Dr. George Engelmann in St. Louis, and a correspondence in German survives in the archives of the Missouri Botanical Garden.