William J. Wilgus

William John Wilgus. [Born] 1865. Engineer. A Centurion for forty-seven years.

This was a boy from Buffalo with only three years of high school education, topped off with a correspondence course in drafting, who in his thirties was chief engineer of the New York Central Railroad, who in his forties conceived and built the Grand Central Terminal and electrified the Central into New York and out to its suburbia, who won the Telford Gold Medal of the British Institute of Civil Engineers for devising a new method of getting a tunnel under the Detroit River, who was chairman of the engineering committee for the Holland Tunnel, who was director of Army rail transport in France during the First World War with a Colonel’s rank and later a D.S.M., who built the Duluth and Mesabi Railroad to the iron mines of my native Minnesota long before I was born.

It is such an amazing record that it would be incredible were it not documented true.

Consider the problem of the Grand Central Terminal. You have all seen a railroad yard with the tracks coming in straight and then fanning out into broad curves, gracefully—dozens and dozens of them. The first problem of Grand Central Terminal was that the tracks could not fan out properly, for there was not enough side room: the area of the possible fan was bounded on the East by Lexington and on the West by Vanderbilt Avenues.

Forty years later he told that the solution came to him in “a flash of light” in September 1902. He would build tracks, bridges, buildings all in a single structural entity—not as separate things but as integral parts of an immense new whole.

He designed two fans, one above the other, to save width—tunnelled them out forty feet deep in the solid rock, a Lower Level with an Upper Level fan 20 feet closer to the surface. He designed Park Avenue as a continuous bridge over the tracks, he put buildings on top of the fan—their underpinnings reaching down to bedrock independent of the upper and lower fans. This last idea made the concept an engineering feasibility; it transformed the railroad’s land from a dead-weight holding into a vast revenue-producing property. It was the vital financial principle which made the great engineering concept live. The Board of Directors of the Central considered and adopted the whole plan in one afternoon—a $34,360,000 venture—so clearly and cleanly and confidently was it presented by one of the most acute minds that ever wandered into the field of engineering.

It was the same in France, where as Director of Military Railways of the A. E. F. he had the reputation of being the “fastest man ever to size up a situation,” who “saw everything in its exact relation to everything else.”

The story goes that upon a day in September, 1918, he was called by Pershing to attend a council of officers at general headquarters. He was late in arriving, and Pershing decided to go on without him. Pershing announced that the Americans were about to take over a sector of their own—the San Mihiel sector which, up to then, they had been sharing with the British. And Pershing was determined to attack at once. The purpose of the council, he said, was to plan the attack.

According to one who was present at the council, the talk had been going on for two hours, not very profitably, when Wilgus arrived. In that abrupt way of his, Pershing told Wilgus the bare purpose of the council, and immediately called upon him to speak. And without knowing what any of the others might have said previously, without even waiting to remove his dripping raincoat, Wilgus began.

He spoke for an hour and half without a pause: There was a swift unfolding of the whole situation at San Mihiel—the terrain, the obstacles, the troops, the guns, the whole state of readiness for an advance; even the names, the experience, and the reputation of the German regiments blocking the way. There was a careful weighing of one factor against another, as if Wilgus were delivering a prepared lecture. There was a mapping out of steps to be taken in a given sequence; not as if those steps were part of a concocted scheme but as if each in turn were dictated—as in fact they were—by things inherent in the situation itself. And there was a forecast that the battle would be won in forty-eight hours.

Then Wilgus sat down; and there was the silence of men who had not the breath to speak.

It was Pershing who broke the silence. In effect, he said that that was it; that they would do as Wilgus had made it plain they must do.

The battle of San Mihiel began at midnight of September 11/12, 1918. It was ended forty-eight hours later. And it opened up that gap in the German line that enabled the American divisions to launch their great and decisive Meuse-Argonne offensive.

And what did the Century mean to this great man and what did he mean to the Century? I will tell you in his own words. As your Secretary I wrote him a letter on his eighty-third birthday and this is a part of his response: “the messages you send me from beloved fellow-Centurions move me deeply, and I dwell in the hope that occasion may offer you an opportunity to convey to them, one and all, and not forgetting ‘Dan,’ my acknowledgments coming from the heart. In fact your letter, so eloquent with friendship, is to join my most prized possessions reminiscent of the very best in life.

“I close this letter with a salutation betokening warmth of feeling from the bosom of . . .

“Yours in affection

“William J. Wilgus”

Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia

Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1949 Memorials