Claude Crozet was born at Villefranche, in France on December 31, 1789 to Pierrette Varion Crozet and her husband, wine merchant Francois Crozet. His mother died when he was a boy, and his father moved to Paris in 1800 with Claude and two siblings.
He was educated at the École Polytechnique.
In 1807 was commissioned in the artillery. Fie served with credit at Wagram and in the Russian campaign, was captured during the retreat from Moscow, and remained a prisoner in Russia for two years, being released and allowed to return to France only after the fall of Napoleon. He then resigned his captaincy, but rejoined the army on the Emperor’s return from Elba.
The second restoration of the Bourbons left him once more out of the service, and in 1816 he determined to seek his fortune in a new country. Gen. Simon Bernard, the distinguished French military engineer, had just been appointed to a position in the engineer service of the United States army, and Crozet accompanied him to America.
On the recommendations of Lafayette and Albert Gallatin, he was appointed, October 1816, assistant professor of engineering at West Point, and on March 6, 1817, was made professor and head of the department. Up to this time instruction in engineering there had been unsystematic and elementary; Crozet improved it greatly, particularly by requiring a much more substantial foundation of mathematics.
He introduced the study of descriptive geometry, not hitherto taught in the United States, and prepared the first American textbook on the subject. Both at West Point and at the Virginia Military Institute, with which he was later associated, descriptive geometry has continued a specialty up to the present time.
Resigning his professorship in 1823, he soon after became state engineer of Virginia.
He left that position in 1832, and spent five years in engineering and educational work in Louisiana, but returned to his place in Virginia in 1839.
Crozet was a member of the original Board of Visitors, was chosen president of the board, and retained that office until 1845. The statute creating the new institution provided that it should be a “military school, ” and “give instruction in military science and in other branches of knowledge”; also that the students should be “formed into a military corps” and “constitute the public guard of the arsenal. ” Subject to these very general directions, its character and curriculum were left to the discretion of the Board of Visitors. Crozet’s influence caused it to be modeled closely after the pattern of West Point, where he had previously taught, and whose course of study, indeed, was in a considerable degree his own creation. The regulations of the Military Academy were adopted substantially without change, and its uniform was quite closely copied. The course of instruction could not be made identical, partly for lack of funds and partly on account of the difference in the future vocations of the students of the two schools; but the resemblance was strong, military and mathematical subjects being greatly emphasized.
In 1857 Crozet was appointed principal assistant to Capt. Montgomery C. Meigs for the construction of the aqueduct which supplies the city of Washington with water from the Great Falls of the Potomac. By a natural misapprehension, the building of the Aqueduct Bridge to the Virginia shore is sometimes ascribed to him. He was not employed upon this, however, for the structure was the property of a canal company and had no connection with the city’s water-supply system. In 1859, when work on the aqueduct was suspended because of exhaustion of funds, he became principal of the Richmond Academy, and held that position until his death.
He had the vision and the technical ability to plan a great development of inland communication by road, canal, and railroad, which, though never entirely carried out, gave Virginia one of the best road systems in the country for the time. He urged, though unsuccessfully, the creation of a through route from the seaboard to the West by canalizing the James River from the head of navigation at Richmond up to Lynchburg, and by the construction of a railroad from that point to deep water on the Kanawha. Perhaps his greatest engineering achievement was the location and construction of a railroad through the Blue Ridge between Albemarle and Augusta counties, which later passed into the possession of the Chesapeake & Ohio Company. He is now best remembered, however, for his work in connection with the Virginia Military Institute, formally organized in 1839.
On June 7, 1816, in Paris, Crozet married Agathe Decamp.
