User:PRRfan/Hazlehurst

Some dates don't match up.

Henry R. Hazlehurst (1815-1900) was an American civil engineer. Long employed by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, he also helped build the first rail link between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and points south.

Hazelhurst was born on March 2, 1815, a son of Richard Hunter Hazlehurst of Mount Holly, New Jersey, and Maria Eleanor Blagden of London, England. He was born in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, England, and moved to Salem, New Jersey, with the family in 1819.

In the late 1820s, Hazlehurst served as one of the assistants to Benjamin H. Latrobe, a civil engineer who helped survey the Baltimore and Ohio's routes to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C.. Let go after the work was completed, Latrobe in 1835 became chief engineer of the Baltimore and Port Deposit Railroad, with Hazlehurst again among his assistants. In the late 1830s, the B&PD was merged into the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad, the first rail link from Philadelphia to Baltimore. (This main line survives today as part of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.) Hazlehurst's service as a railroad executive is noted on the 1839 Newkirk Viaduct Monument in Philadelphia.

Hazlehurst married Elizabeth McKim; their children included George Blagden Hazlehurst (1855-1919), an engineer who went to work for the B&O and ultimately rose to the position of General Superintendent of Motive Power.

In mid-century, he and James Murray, another former assistant of Latrobe's, took over the Vulcan Works machine shop in Baltimore. They later founded the mechanical engineering firm of Murray and Hazlehurst, which became Hazlehurst and Company.

Hazlehurst died on Feb. 21., 1900, in Baltimore.

married John McKim Jr's granddaughter