Background
Charles Hazlehurst Latrobe was born in Baltimore, the eldest of the five children of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the second, and his wife, Maria Eleanor Hazlehurst.
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Charles Hazlehurst Latrobe
Edit ProfileEducation
He attended St. Mary's College, in his native city.
Career
Latrobe learned the rudiments of his profession in his father's office--which was probably the best school of its kind in the United States--and graduated thence into the service of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. A few years later he went to Florida as the youthful but very capable chief engineer in charge of construction on the Pensacola & Georgia Railroad.
Stationed at Tallahassee when the state seceded from the Union, he promptly threw in his lot with the South and, as a lieutenant of engineers in the Confederate army, completed the grading, bridge-building, and rail-laying on the last twenty miles of the Pensacola & Georgia. The road proved of considerable military use.
At the close of the war Latrobe returned to Baltimore, which was his home for the rest of his life. From 1866 to 1877 he was associated with his father and with Charles Shaler Smith in the Baltimore Bridge Company. This firm erected bridges in many parts of the eastern United States. Latrobe's own work, which was of a high order, was noted especially for its structural beauty.
He was appointed engineer of the Jones Falls commission in Baltimore in 1875, when his cousin, Ferdinand Claiborne Latrobe, entered on his first term as mayor of the city; and he remained in the city employ until 1889. He designed and built the great retaining walls along the Falls and designed and constructed the iron bridges across the valley at St. Paul Street, Calvert Street, and Guilford Avenue and built a number of other bridges in Baltimore.
He also executed several commissions for the Peruvian government. At Arequipa he constructed an aqueduct 1, 300 feet long and sixty-five feet high; and at Verrugas, on the Callao-Oroya-Huancayo railway, he built the most famous of his bridges. Spanning one of the deepest gorges in the Andes, it was 575 feet in length and had a central wrought-iron pier 252 feet high. It was said to be the tallest bridge in the world. It was framed in the United States, then taken apart for shipment, and was reërected in ninety days. During his latter years Latrobe was consulting engineer for several railroads. Latrobe possessed the engaging social qualities as well as the engineering and artistic genius of his family. He died in Baltimore after an illness of a year and was buried in Greenmount Cemetery.
Achievements
Connections
Latrobe was married three times: in 1861 to a widow, Letitia Breckenridge (Gamble) Holliday, who bore him two daughters and a son and died in 1867; in 1869 to Rosa Wirt Robinson, who died the next year; and in 1881 to Louise, widow of Isaac McKim.
