A Tale of Two
Countries:
Samuel and
William Weston
Samuel Weston was one of many contractors and engineers
who was engaged in building canals in England during the 'canal mania' of the
second half of the 18th Century.
There are records of Sam Weston's work on various canals from about 1770
to virtually the end of the century.
In April 1772 he was appointed Engineer for the Chester
Canal, after previously having been a contractor for cutting canals. The 19 miles of the Chester Canal from the
Dee at Chester to Nantwich Basin were built, initially under Samuel Weston's
direction, for boats 72 feet long and 13 feet 6 inches wide, but he
relinquished his position in 1774; the canal as far as Nantwich was finally opened
in 1779.
Sam Weston, who seems to have
been an Oxfordshire man, then worked on the northern section of the Oxford
Canal in 1778 as a surveyor or engineer.
It is possible that between the two jobs he worked as an assistant to an
experienced surveyor in order to improve his skills. Certainly he was not afraid to voice his opinions. When, for instance, an error in taking the
levels resulted in the Oxford Canal being 6 inches higher than the
Coventry Canal at their junction, Sam Weston is recorded as having said that
this was "a most egregious error where a canal is so distressed for
water". He also said of the 33-yard
long tunnel at Wolfhamcote that a bridge would have answered the purpose.
Next Sam Weston returned to the North West, where he and
John Lawton, who had been employed as Sam's assistant engineer on the Chester
Canal, were the initial contractors for the Liverpool end of the Leeds &
Liverpool Canal, a job which was completed in 1780. In June 1785 he was again commissioned by the Oxford Canal
Company, this time to survey the River Cherwell from Banbury to Oxford, as well
as the River Swift from Cockford to Lutterworth, to see if they could be made
navigable, which he concluded was possible.
The bridge across the Cherwell at the eastern end of
Oxford had been known in earlier times as Pettypont, later it was called simply
East Bridge and finally Magdalen Bridge.
Plans for a richly ornamented balustrade were later modified and the
present plain design by John Townsend was adopted. It seems that the town council had decided that the money needed
for the balustrade would be better spent on making the river properly
navigable. In the event, the plans for
the navigation were not implemented either, possibly as a result of objections
from the colleges, who would not have relished the presence of vulgar boatmen.
In mid-1788 Sam Weston made a survey for a branch off the
River Stort to Saffron Waldon, but the branch itself was never built. The Stort, which joins the River Lee a few miles
below Hertford, is not as old a navigation as the Lee; the first Act for
navigational improvements was only passed in the 18th Century. Parts of the river had been canalized in
1769 and the proposed branch may have been planned together with another plan
to connect with the River Cam near Cambridge.
The amount of traffic on the river, however, was never likely to justify
the investment.
Later in the same year, together with Samuel Simcock, who
had been an assistant to James Brindley on the Staffordshire &
Worcestershire, the Old Main Line of the BCN and the Oxford Canal and James
Barnes, Sam Weston made surveys for alternative narrow or a barge canals from
the River Kennet at Newbury to bath.
His final project seems to have been to survey a route for a London
& Western Canal from the Oxford Canal at Hampton Gay, six miles north of
Oxford, by way of Thame, Wendover, Amersham and Uxbridge to Marylebone (later
changed to the River Thames at Isleworth.
The 60-mile canal was also to have had a branch to Aylesbury, but the
project never got beyond the planning stage.
Far away, across the Atlantic, canal mania had spread to
the independent United States of America.
In 1792, a group of businessmen in Pennsylvania wrote to a contact in
Britain, Patrick Colquhoun, a London magistrate of Scottish and American
origins, asking him to find a civil engineer who could take charge of canal and
road building in the state. Weston was
not Colquhoun's first choice, despite the fact that it seems he was recommended
to him by William Jessop, then one of the leading civil engineers in England.
William Weston (c1763-1833) was the son of Sam
Weston. From details found in his
notebook, a neatly handwritten compendium of technical information (in the
archives of the Institution of Civil Engineers in London) he was probably
involved in working in a junior capacity with his father on the Oxford Canal,
and obviously learned civil engineering skills from him, although the details
of his early life are hazy. His most
outstanding work, undertaken when he was just 24 years of age, was a three-span
turnpike bridge over the river Trent at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. Started in 1787 and finished in 1791, at a
cost of just over £10,000, both the bridge and the turnpike road that ran across
it from Gainsborough to Retford were William's work. He was responsible as both engineer and managing contractor for
the design and construction of the bridge, which is a handsome and substantial
three-span bridge of ashlar masonry across the tidal Trent. The arches span 62, 70 and 62 feet. The overall width of the roadway was
originally 29 feet, although cantilevered walkways were later added. Today the same bridge carries much heavier
flows of traffic that its designer and builder could have envisaged, with no
signs of deterioration other than some surface damage to its piers caused by
impact from barges. It is
self-evidently the work of a confident and more than competent engineer, but it
is the only identifiable work by William Weston in England.
William sailed from Falmouth for Philadelphia in January
1793 with his bride, Charlotte, the daughter of Richard Whitehouse, a partner
in the Hornby & Whitehouse brewery in Gainsborough. He had accepted a five-year engagement as
Engineer to the Schuylkill & Susquehanna Navigation Company. He is particularly remembered in the United
States as the man who first introduced a sophisticated optical surveying level
he had brought with him. The Troughton
Wye Level, an instrument used for accurately determining differences of
elevations between points, had been completely unknown in the USA, but it was
soon in use on almost every canal and other civil engineering project there.
In Philadelphia the Westons stayed at the home of Robert
Morris who, besides being a promoter of the Canal Company, was also a Member of
Congress who had been appointed the first Superintendent of Finance by the
Congress in 1781. During the War of
Independence, Morris had continued to exchange private letters with a number of
gentlemen in England, by which means he often received information of great
importance to the American patriots. He
had also signed the Declaration of Independence: the Rev. Charles A. Goodrich in his book "Lives of the Signers to
the Declaration of Independence" said, "An introduction to Mr. Morris was a
matter of course, with all the strangers in good society, who, for half a
century, visited Philadelphia, either on commercial, public, or private
business". William Weston, son of a
navy gang-master, was highly honoured.
At this period, at the start of the American canal era,
there were few if any experienced engineers in the United States. The Americans' plans, however, were
ambitious. Two companies had actually
been chartered by the State of Pennsylvania in 1792, one, the Schuylkill and
Susquehanna Canal Company, to build a canal from the Delaware River to
Norristown. As soon as William and
Charlotte had settled in Philadelphia, he set to work designing locks for the
navigation. However, by 1794, although
the companies had completed 15 miles of the navigation, including several lift
locks, they had spent $440,000. Their
funds were exhausted and construction stopped and was not to restart for
another twenty-seven years.
Nevertheless, William was a key catalyst in enabling a
whole generation of American civil engineers to develop the skills they would
need in surveying and engineering canals.
Loami Baldwin sought him out as the only experienced canal engineer in
New England and persuaded him to spend a few weeks at Boston, running surveys
for the second sizeable American canal, the 44.28 km Middlesex Canal from
Boston to Lowell (1794-1803). It had 20
locks, seven aqueducts, and 50 bridges; it became a field-study project for
many of the engineers on the Erie Canal and facilitated the development of the
great textile centre at Lowell.
When the two Schuylkill companies became insolvent,
Weston had already become actively involved with three other canal
projects. The first of these was the
Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts, the construction of which began in October
1794 and was completed on schedule on 31st December 1803. The canal started at a junction with the
Merrimack River in the city of Lowell and ran from there to the Mill Pond in
Charlestown, a distance of 27 miles.
Over the following forty years, the Middlesex Canal was the most
economical method of moving heavy or bulky cargoes between Lowell and Boston,
and it was directly responsible for the growth of Lowell as the first
industrial city in Massachusetts. The
navigation was subsequently extended, in 1815, to Concord, New Hampshire with
the completion of canals to by-pass the falls and rapids of the Merrimack
River.
Weston was also asked personally by President Washington
to advise on the Potowmack Canal Locks at Great Falls and to assist the Western
Inland Lock Navigation Company, intended to link the Hudson River with the
Great Lakes in the north of New York State, which was the precursor of the Erie
Canal. Benjamin Wright, who was later
to be regarded as America's leading canal engineer, was one of Weston's
assistants. In 1792 the New York
legislature had granted charters to the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company
to make the Mohawk River navigable between the Hudson River and Lake Ontario and
Lake Seneca. At the same time, the
legislature granted charters to the Northern Inland Lock Navigation Company,
which intended to, but never succeeded in, connecting the Hudson with Lake
George and Lake Champlain, because of a lack of capital. The Western Company did at least succeed, by
means of locks and short canals, in opening an unsatisfactory navigation
between the Hudson and the Great Lakes, but it never paid a dividend to its
investors and was finally abandoned following the completion of the Erie Canal
in 1825.
Weston returned to England in 1801, but he kept up his
connections with the USA and between 1811 and 1813 he acted as a consultant (by
mail) to the Erie Canal Commissioners, although he refused the offer of the
post of Chief Engineer with a generous salary, because the United States and
Great Britain had been at war in 1812.
His one-time assistant, Benjamin Wright, was appointed to the position.
The details of Weston's life and career following his
return to England are every bit as obscure as they had been before he and
Charlotte left England for Philadelphia seven years earlier. He had been exceptionally well paid for his
work in America, and, although he was not yet forty, he could well afford to
take an early retirement and live in comfort, without having to brave all
weathers to make surveys. His
reputation as an engineer was already well established on both sides of the
Atlantic. Weston was highly regarded by
his American contemporaries, and their opinions are borne out both by the
contents of his reports and by the skill and success with which he executed his
work. The only dissenting voice was
that of De Witt Clinton, the governor of New York, who remarked that Weston
was, perhaps unsurprisingly, 'totally ignorant of the country and its people'
and that his designs were 'unnecessarily costly'.
Weston and his wife seem to have settled in Gainsborough,
near Charlotte's family. He died 'very
suddenly,' it was reported, 'from an ossification of the heart' (in which
carbonate and phosphate of lime is deposited in the valves of the heart) on 29th
August 1833 in London.
© Andy Wood
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