Lake County Ohio GenWeb

Charles Burridge Hawley

As published in the Alumni Record, Painesville High School, Painesville, Ohio
Compiled and Published by the Painesville High School Alumni Association in 1925

Transcribed by Linda Jeffery, November 2004.

Charles Burridge Hawley, ’04

This is the story of a Painesville High School boy who dreamed of success and who not only lived, but is living to see his dreams come true.

This boy is Charles Burridge Hawley of the Class of 1904. His classmates will remember him as a thorough student, an ambitious lad who was not satisfied until he had done his best. And this is the very secret of his success.

In 1908 he concluded his civil engineering course at Case School of Applied Sciences with high honors and returned for an added year devoted to special work for the school in electrical and mechanical engineering. He was awarded a fellowship for 1909 and this work was done at that time.

In 1910 Mr. Hawley accepted a position with The Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company of North Michigan as hydro-electric engineer and it is quite likely that it was while at work on the installation of a water power plant for this Company that he developed the penchant for hydro-electrics that turned his life’s course along paths of industrial romance to the heights of constructional achievements.

After two years service he became assistant to a Consulting Engineer of Jackson, Michigan. Three years later he was appointed Assistant Hydro-Electric Engineer to The Aluminum Company of America at Pittsburg, Pa. He completed several plants for this company in North Carolina and Tennessee and did it so well that they sent him to Japan and Korea to look up suitable locations for water power development. His work kept him in these countries about eighteen months.

The next few years carried him from Japan to New York state; from New York state to New Zealand; from New Zealand to North Carolina and Tennessee; from Tennessee to South America and when ever the engineer bought a ticket and checked his trunk and blue prints for a new destination he left behind him a monument to American ingenuity and constructional genius where there was but a mountain stream before.

He resigned in 1922 and opened an office in the Munsey Building in Washington, D.C. as consulting H.E. Engineer. This year he will have completed a plant in U.S. of Columbia, S.A. and one on the Clarion River north of Pittsburgh, Pa. A $5,000,000 development is now under construction in the Cumberland Mountains, north of Oakland, Md. The great extent of the undertaking can best be judged by the fact that 1,000 men have been employed for the past 18 months in ripping through a solid mountain of rock to establish the dam and power house and there is a year’s work yet to be done.

Declaring the project to be the greatest engineering feat ever attempted in Maryland, the Cumberland Evening Times devotes a full page to what it terms “C.B. Hawley’s task of transforming a wilderness into a state’s industrial heart.”

Mr. Hawley’s family consists of his wife, nee Miss Antoinette Wright, daughter of Prof. Wright of Case School of Applied Sciences, two daughters, Eleanor and Antoinette, Jr., and one son, Charles Burridge, Jr. His home is at Chevy Chase, a suburb of Washington, D.C.