James Fowle Baldwin

James Fowle Baldwin (April 29, 1782 – May 20, 1862) was an early American civil engineer who worked with his father and brothers on the Middlesex Canal, surveyed and designed the Boston and Lowell Railroad and the Boston and Albany Railroad, the first Boston water supply from Lake Cochituate, and many other early engineering projects. He was the first president of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers and served one term as a Senator from Suffolk County to the Massachusetts Senate, then served as a Boston Water Commissioner.

James Fowle Baldwin was born in Woburn and died in Boston aged eighty. He married July 28, 1818, Sarah Parsons, daughter of Samuel and Sarah (Parsons) Pitkin, of East Hartford, Connecticut. They had three sons all of whom died in childhood. One at the age of eight in 1829; and the two others of typhus fever in 1834, at the ages of fifteen and six years.

James was the fourth son of Loammi Baldwin Sr., and received his early education in the schools of his native Woburn and in the academies at Billerica and Westford. About 1803 he was in Boston acquiring a mercantile education. He was later established there as a merchant; but the influence of his early association with the engineering faculties of the older members of his own family turned his attention in that direction.

He joined his brother Loammi Baldwin, Jr. in the construction of the Boston Navy Yard dry dock at Charlestown. In 1828. he, with two others, were appointed commissioners to make the survey for a railroad to the western part of the state, this being then a new and untried enterprise, and the survey was made from Boston to Albany. Upon this work he was engaged for more than two years. It was not prosecuted at the time, but subsequently the Western railroad, so called, was built upon the location selected by him and his plans were generally adopted. He always looked upon this, next to the introduction of pure water into Boston, as the most important of his professional works.

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