Francis Trenholm Crowe was born on October 12, 1882 in Trenholmville, Quebec, Canada to John Crowe and Emma Jane (Wilkinson) Crowe. His father had come to the United States from England in 1869; his mother was a native of Brooklyn, New York. The couple were married in 1880 and soon afterward moved to Quebec.
where John Crowe established and operated a woolen mill until 1888. He then returned to the United States and founded a similar mill in Fairfield, Iowa, but it failed after two years. During the next nine years he held mill superintendencies at Kezar Falls, Maine, and Picton, N. J. , before settling in 1899 in Byfield, Massachussets Francis Crowe completed elementary school in Byfield and attended nearby Governor Dummer Academy, graduating in 1901. That fall he entered the University of Maine. Although his father urged him to pursue a medical career, he chose engineering, and received the B. S. degree in civil engineering in 1905. Inspired by a visiting lecturer, Frank E. Weymouth of the federal Reclamation Service, Crowe spent the summer of 1904 working for the service on a survey party in Montana. He was strongly attracted to the West, and after graduating he secured a regular position with the Reclamation Service. Except for three years (1906 - 1908, 1920) when he worked for private contractors, Crowe remained with the service for two decades, as assistant superintendent and superintendent of construction for several western dams. The Reclamation Service was reorganized in 1923 as the Bureau of Reclamation, and the following year Frank Crowe was named general supervisor of all construction activities in seventeen western states.
In 1925, however, the bureau discontinued its construction force and began to let out the work to private contractors, and Crowe, who disliked desk work and loved an active, outdoor role, resigned. Fired by a dream of building supersized dams, Crowe joined the Morrison-Knudsen Company, a construction firm of Boise, Idaho. The United States was entering a period of extensive dam building, and Crowe served during the late 1920's as engineering supervisor of the Guernsey Dam in Wyoming, the Van Giesen (Coombe) Dam in California, and the Deadwood Dam in central Idaho. When the Reclamation Bureau requested bids for the 726-foot-high Boulder (later Hoover) Dam, to be constructed in Black Canyon on the Colorado River, Crowe successfully urged his employer, Harry W. Morrison, to promote a syndicate with other construction firms (including that of Henry J. Kaiser). The syndicate was named Six Companies, Inc. , and submitted a bid. Crowe in 1919 had prepared cost estimates for a dam at Black Canyon for the Reclamation Service, and he was assigned the task of preparing the estimates for the Morrison firm. Each of the six companies drew up bids, but it was Crowe's figures that the syndicate submitted. Six Companies won the contract in 1931, and Crowe was named general superintendent in charge of construction. After overcoming serious organizational difficulties among the syndicate's leaders, Crowe took firm command of the construction program. Besides the dam itself, he supervised the building of the dam's power plant and of the town of Boulder City, which housed the working force. His use of cableways to convey construction materials at the dam was a bold stroke for that time. So skillfully did he coordinate the men and the materials involved in a vast and complex project that the dam was completed in 1935, a record twenty-five months ahead of schedule. Crowe and the syndicate continued their profitable relationship. In 1936 "The Old Man, " as Crowe was affectionately known by his men, supervised the building of Parker Dam down river from the Hoover Dam. He also directed the building of two water storage dams in California in 1937 and 1938. In 1938 Six Companies was underbid for construction of the massive Shasta Dam, a key structure in the Central Valley Project of California, but Crowe was chosen by Pacific Constructors, Inc. , winners of the contract, to supervise construction.
The Shasta project--the second major project of Crowe's career--required all of his technical daring because of problems of terrain, foundation, and heavy seasonal rains. Here, since horizontal cableways were not suitable, Crowe designed a unique and widely acclaimed system of 25-ton-capacity radial cableways operating from a 460-foot tower to carry concrete and other materials to every area of the construction project. Crowe completed the project, which proved to be his last, in 1944, a few months ahead of schedule, despite the complications of wartime demands for labor and materials. Crowe found time during his career for professional activity. He wrote frequent essays for engineering journals and for Bureau of Reclamation publications.
He died of coronary thrombosis at Mercy Hospital in Redding, and was buried in the Redding Cemetery.
Crowe pioneered two practices that are crucial to the construction of large dams. He invented a pneumatic delivery system to transport concrete and a system of overhead cables to allow the pneumatic concrete to be pumped at any point on the construction site. The American Society of Civil Engineers, of which he had been a member since 1915, elevated him to honorary membership in 1943, a rank attained by very few engineers. Frank Crowe, said one contemporary, "changed the physical landscape perhaps more than any other individual in history. " Few would challenge this assertion about the man who constructed nineteen dams over a period of forty years.
He was a member of The American Society of Civil Engineers.
Crowe first married Marie Sass, who died in 1911 shortly after the marriage. On December 9, 1913, he married Linnie Korts of Boise, Idaho. He had two children by his second marriage: Patricia and Elizabeth Jean.
