Frank Crowe

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Francis Trenholm Crowe
Born(1882-10-12)October 12, 1882
Trenholmville, Quebec
DiedFebruary 26, 1946(1946-02-26) (aged 63)
Alma materUniversity of Maine
OccupationCivil engineer

Francis Trenholm Crowe ((1882-10-12)October 12, 1882 – (1946-02-26)February 26, 1946) was a Canadian

Morrison-Knudsen, who later became in 1931, the General Construction Superintendent of the Hoover Dam
construction contract.

Born in Trenholmville,

Morrison-Knudsen in Boise, Idaho. Morrison-Knudsen had recently signed a partnership with the larger Utah Construction Company
to build dams.

While working on the Arrowrock Dam in Idaho, Crowe pioneered two practices that are crucial to the construction of large dams. The first was a pneumatic delivery system to transport concrete and the second was a system of overhead cables to allow the pneumatic concrete to be pumped at any point on the construction site. With this technique, Crowe built some of the largest dams in the American west, including the Hoover Dam, Parker Dam 155 miles (249 km) downstream from Hoover; Copper Basin and Gene Wash Dams on the Colorado Aqueduct system; and Shasta Dam in Northern California. All these dams were important but none approached the mythic scale or mystique of Hoover Dam.[2]

He retired in 1944 to his 20,000-acre (81 km2) cattle ranch near Redding, California, where he died of a heart attack on February 26, 1946. He had a wife, Linnie, and two daughters.[3]

Popular culture

The Hoover Dam construction project and Frank Crowe's role (portrayed by actor Jay Benedict) was dramatised in an episode of the BBC's 2003 docudrama television miniseries Seven Wonders of the Industrial World.[4]

The project and Frank Crowe's role was also dramatized in The History Channel's series America: The Story of Us in episode 9 entitled Bust.[5]

Further reading

  • Rocca, Al M. America's Master Dam Builder: The Engineering Genius of Frank T. Crowe. University Press of Amer, 2001.

References

  1. ^ Guide to the Frank Elwin Weymouth Papers, Water Resources Collection, Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library 2009, Claremont University Consortium.
  2. ^ Borth, Christy. Masters of Mass Production, pp. 118-20, Bobbs-Merrill Co., Indianapolis, IN, 1945.
  3. ^ "Frank Crowe". Las Vegas Review-Journal. 1999-02-07. Retrieved 2020-06-06.
  4. IMDb Edit this at Wikidata
  5. ^ "America The Story of Us — Episode 9: BUST —". History.com. Archived from the original on 2012-10-01. Retrieved 2012-04-20.

External links