J. James R. Croes

J. James R. Croes, during the course of his long and active life, did much notable and varied work in his profession as civil engineer. Born in Virginia in 1834, he was graduated from St. James College, Maryland, at the age of nineteen, and took up the study of engineering, as the custom then was, in the offices of practitioners. His first important service was under the late James P. Kirkwood on the Ridgewood Reservoir in Brooklyn; later he was engaged under Gen. George S. Greene on the Central Park Reservoir of the Croton Water Works and High Bridge extension, of which work he became resident engineer when Gen. Greene resumed service in the army. After an interval of employment in Washington in hydraulic work, he returned to New York in 1865 to take charge of the surveys for the construction of storage reservoirs in the Croton Valley. From 1872 to 1878 he was in the service of the Department of Public Parks in New York as Principal Assistant and Chief Engineer of the Topographical Bureau. With Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted he laid out the street system in what is now the Borough of the Bronx, including plans for rapid transit, and became Chief Engineer of one of the lines suggested. Mr. Croes possessed rare gifts in the investigation, classification, and exposition of data as to the problems of his profession, and his contributions to its literature in this direction were of high authority. His paper, in 1874, on the Boyd’s Corners dam, the first high masonry dam in the United States, was awarded the first Norman Medal. His reports on the plan of the Quaker Bridge dam; on the Water Supply of New York, first to the Controller and then to the Merchants’ Association, are examples familiar to New Yorkers. He was the originator of “The Statistical Tables of American Water-Works,” covering the experience of over 800 cities. Mr. Croes was a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers for nearly forty years, was its Treasurer for ten years following 1877, and its President in 1901. He was also a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers of London, and of a number of American associations connected particularly with hydraulics. He came to The Century in 1884, and was always a steady attendant. His sterling integrity of character was joined to great modesty and kindliness, and he is mourned by many attached friends.

Edward Cary
1907 Century Association Yearbook