Christopher Colles 1738-1821

 

Perhaps the most gifted and versatile of all of the Irish-born professionals in the early Federal period, Colles was born into a prominent family of Kilkenny stone-cutters and building supervisors. He came to America in the years immediately before the Revolution, having enjoyed a career as an architect in Ireland, where he was associated with the Italian David Ducart on projects such as the Limerick Custom House. His family background was in stonework and the service of architects and the gentry in regard to the construction of mansions and he quickly established himself in Philadelphia, where he lectured on hydraulics and pneumatics, produced a design for a steam engine, made proposals for lock navigation on inland waterways, and devised a practical delivery and distribution solution to New York's pressing scarcity of drinkable water. The British ruined his early work on this in their avenging sweep through the city, and following a brief assignment as a gunnery instructor, he bagan work on plans for a canal linking the middle reaches of the Hudson River with Lake Erie via the Mohawk River, which he surveyed as far as Wood Creek in 1785. Again his ambitions were frustrated and he spent the next quarter of a century in miscellaneous manufacturing activities while continuing to produce notes and monographs on mathematical and physical problems. A friend of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton (who died in an 1804 duel related to the harnessing of New York's water resources), Colles provided a semaphore-based telegraph system to American forces during the war of 1812. He spent some of his later years as Superintendent of the American Academy of Fine Arts, and died in relative poverty in 1821. His portrait is to be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.