home

Claudius Crozet was born on December 31, 1789 in Villefranche, France. He moved to America in the fall of 1816 and got married only months before the trip. He married Agathe Decamp in Paris on June 7, 1816. He moved to America with his wife. When he got there he went to West Point and Became a professor of engineering. At West Point he designed some of the buildings there. Crozet became Principal Engineer and Surveyor at the Virginia Board of Public works in 1823. He brought his wife and children, one boy and one girl to Richmond, Virginia when he resigned from his teaching job at West point. Crozet left to go to Louisiana in 1832 for work and came back to Virginia in 1837 and returned to his old job at the Virginia Board of Public Works. Crozet left the Virginia Board of Public Works in 1843. Crozet was one of the founders of V.M.I. in Lexington, Virginia, a training college for engineers and officers for Virginia and the Confederacy. V.M.I. opened in 1839. The architect of the institute's academic and military organizations was Crozet. The Board of Visitors at V.M.I. elected Crozet president of the Board, and held that position for six years. Crozet was the Engineer for the the Blue Ridge tunnel, Brooksville tunnel, Little rock tunnel, and the Greenwood tunnel. Other tunnels were only dug on one side and then to the other. With his tunnel he dug from both sides and they should connect in the middle. He did make the tunnel and he was only six inches of and he didn't use dynamite. The tunnel was completed and opened in 1856, but wasn't used until April of 1858. The tunnel connected the Shenandoah Valley to the east side of the Blue Ridge, the Confederates were able to move troops through the tunnel.

Crozet died in 1864 in Virginia. Crozet was the Chief engineer of the state of Virginia. Thomas Jefferson called him "By far the best mathematician in the United States." The tunnel lengths in order of the other : 4,273, 869, 100, and 536 feet. I got this information from [|Wikipedia]