Village Engineer Carl Crandall
In the history of the village, civil engineer Carl Crandall (1890-1968) ranks in importance with founders Jared Newman and Charles Blood and with Frederick Marcham, the longest serving mayor.
Crandall followed in the footsteps of two uncles who were civil engineers. One was Kirk P. Crandall (1846-1910), who designed the Stewart Avenue Bridge over Fall Creek at the edge of the Cornell campus and surveyed the land that Edward Wyckoff developed into Cornell Heights.[1] The other uncle was Charles Lee Crandall (1850-1917), a member of the first Cornell graduating class in 1872 who stayed on to teach at the university until 1915. Charles did engineering work for the City of Ithaca in addition to teaching and was a member of the city board of public works at the time of his death.[2]
Carl Crandall graduated from Cornell with a C.E. degree in 1912 and after a year of graduate school joined Charles Crandall on the faculty. He too taught for over forty years, taking only three sabbaticals and spending two years away as a pilot and flight instructor in the Army Air Service during World War I. Specializing in engineering and construction, he taught “more than eighteen courses at one time or another” and held various administrative positions in the engineering school before retiring in 1958 with the rank of professor emeritus. Colleagues were able to write that his death ten years later “marked the first time in one hundred years that at least one member of the Crandall family was not either a student or a member of the faculty at Cornell.”[3]
Crandall did not limit himself to teaching. “Off campus Carl was even more active as a licensed professional engineer, businessman, and civic leader,” colleagues explained. [4] Engineering projects in the greater Ithaca area over the years included the foundations of the DeWitt Junior High School, the Rothschild Building on the Commons downtown, and the Tompkins County Courthouse. He was the executive officer of the Finger Lakes Park Commission during the development of Robert H. Treman and Buttermilk state parks. In business locally he was president of the Ithaca Savings and Loan Association and an officer of the Ithaca Chamber of Commerce. Serving the community, he directed WPA projects during the Great Depression, and in World War II, when a son Peter was in the Army, chaired the local Selective Service Board. At Cornell he was a member of the faculty committee that governed the Cornell Plantations from its inception in 1944.
His civic leadership reached its fullest expression, however, in Cayuga Heights. He began doing land surveys for Newman and Blood as a young man and carried on producing countless plans for roads and water and sewer lines over the course of half a century. His maps record the growth of the village from the .44 square mile incorporated in June 1915 to 1.82 square miles when it was enlarged by annexation in April 1953. A large Crandall map dated January 1, 1960 secured to the wall of the courtroom at Marcham Hall remains to this day a point of reference for meetings of the village board of trustees, planning board and board of zoning appeals, as well as its historians who can find on it the names of every property owner in the village at the time.[5]
There have only been three engineers in the century-long history of Cayuga Heights. Carl Crandall was succeeded by John B. (Jack) Rogers III from 1962 to 1994. Brent Cross who has held the position since then has often remarked that the continuity resultant from the more than thirty-year tenures of his two predecessors has greatly benefited the system of public works.
Engineer Crandall’s association was informal in the early years of the village; he was officially appointed in May 1927 and paid on a fee-for-service basis.[6] Reappointed annually thereafter, he received a part-time salary of $3,600 in 1961 when he retired having served during the terms of the first thirteen mayors and boards of trustees.[7]
“Village Engineer, Carl Crandall, kept in motion from day to day the work of translating policy into action,” observed Mayor Frederick Marcham near the end of his own thirty-two years in office from 1956 to 1988: [8]
"Carl . . . was aware of all the informal and formal ways of persuasion and manipulation necessary to get things done in public and private life, especially with Cornell and the City of Ithaca. He acted for Village interests as he saw them, without the advice from me or from the Board. . . . He had confidence in his own powers and with every right."[9]
In an interview Frederick Marcham was quoted as saying that along with the other professional employees, meaning the village clerks and the fire and police chiefs, the engineers are “the real village leaders.”[10] Years hence there are residents who still remember Carl Crandall and the fine service he gave them when building a home or filing a variance application while he served as zoning officer in addition to his other duties. They can also recall the smell of ever-present cigars.
The most visible legacy of Carl Crandall’s decades of service are the twenty-one miles of roads in Cayuga Heights, most all of them graded and laid while he was in office beginning with the extension of Highland Road into Cayuga Heights from Cornell Heights in 1922 using gravel dug from the sand bank where Sunset Park is located. In 1931, after several years of planning he supervised the installation of the first section of the all-important sewer system that would prove crucial to village enlargement two decades later. The late Walter Lynn, another civil engineering professor at Cornell who was mayor from 2003 to 2007, strongly advised officials following him to maintain the precious, if unseen, legacy of village water and sewer lines.
Fortunately, Carl Crandall’s career is well documented in the archives of the Cornell University Library, The History Center of Tompkins County, and T. G. Miller, the engineering and surveying company in which he had a major interest downtown in Ithaca on North Aurora Street. Maps kept at Marcham Hall that he drew are still consulted for road, sewer, and water improvements. A few years ago new owners found two tripods Carl Crandall must have left in the attic of 207 Cayuga Heights Road, the handsome Tudor revival home he built for his family in the late 1920s and lived in for the rest of his life. Perhaps he used one of them when he surveyed the original boundaries of Cayuga Heights; to date no one has found the stone posts he placed in the ground to identify the four corners of the then new municipality.
Written by Beatrice Szekely
Village Historian
2016
Endnotes:
[1] Interpretive signage on the Thurston Avenue Bridge, prepared by the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library and “Kirk P. Crandall, Railroad Builder” Industrial World 44, no. 1 (April 11, 1910), 457.
[2] A. J. Himes, Willard Beahan, H. S. Jacoby and F. E. Turneaure, “Charles Lee Crandall, a Memoir, November 1917,” Bulletin of the American Railway Engineering Association 19, no. 201.
[3] S. C. Hollister, William McGuire and J. C. Gebhard, “Carl Crandall, July 22, 1890 – April 25, 1968,” Cornell Faculty Memorial Statements.
[4] Ibid.
[5] A notation on the map indicates it was revised by Robin M. Rogers in September 1977.
[6] History of Village of Cayuga Heights, two pages typewritten from the files of Frederick Marcham, n.d, likely prepared by Village Attorney Charles H. Newman in the early 1930s.
[7] Minutes of the Village of Cayuga Heights Board of Trustees Annual Organizational Meeting, April 3, 1961.
[8] Frederick G. Marcham, Memories of Cayuga Heights, N.Y., March 22, 1988, 14.
[9] Ibid, 14-15.
[10] Lachlan Carmichael, “For Last 30 Years,” an interview with Frederick G. Marcham, Syracuse Herald American, March 23, 1986.
Crandall followed in the footsteps of two uncles who were civil engineers. One was Kirk P. Crandall (1846-1910), who designed the Stewart Avenue Bridge over Fall Creek at the edge of the Cornell campus and surveyed the land that Edward Wyckoff developed into Cornell Heights.[1] The other uncle was Charles Lee Crandall (1850-1917), a member of the first Cornell graduating class in 1872 who stayed on to teach at the university until 1915. Charles did engineering work for the City of Ithaca in addition to teaching and was a member of the city board of public works at the time of his death.[2]
Carl Crandall graduated from Cornell with a C.E. degree in 1912 and after a year of graduate school joined Charles Crandall on the faculty. He too taught for over forty years, taking only three sabbaticals and spending two years away as a pilot and flight instructor in the Army Air Service during World War I. Specializing in engineering and construction, he taught “more than eighteen courses at one time or another” and held various administrative positions in the engineering school before retiring in 1958 with the rank of professor emeritus. Colleagues were able to write that his death ten years later “marked the first time in one hundred years that at least one member of the Crandall family was not either a student or a member of the faculty at Cornell.”[3]
Crandall did not limit himself to teaching. “Off campus Carl was even more active as a licensed professional engineer, businessman, and civic leader,” colleagues explained. [4] Engineering projects in the greater Ithaca area over the years included the foundations of the DeWitt Junior High School, the Rothschild Building on the Commons downtown, and the Tompkins County Courthouse. He was the executive officer of the Finger Lakes Park Commission during the development of Robert H. Treman and Buttermilk state parks. In business locally he was president of the Ithaca Savings and Loan Association and an officer of the Ithaca Chamber of Commerce. Serving the community, he directed WPA projects during the Great Depression, and in World War II, when a son Peter was in the Army, chaired the local Selective Service Board. At Cornell he was a member of the faculty committee that governed the Cornell Plantations from its inception in 1944.
His civic leadership reached its fullest expression, however, in Cayuga Heights. He began doing land surveys for Newman and Blood as a young man and carried on producing countless plans for roads and water and sewer lines over the course of half a century. His maps record the growth of the village from the .44 square mile incorporated in June 1915 to 1.82 square miles when it was enlarged by annexation in April 1953. A large Crandall map dated January 1, 1960 secured to the wall of the courtroom at Marcham Hall remains to this day a point of reference for meetings of the village board of trustees, planning board and board of zoning appeals, as well as its historians who can find on it the names of every property owner in the village at the time.[5]
There have only been three engineers in the century-long history of Cayuga Heights. Carl Crandall was succeeded by John B. (Jack) Rogers III from 1962 to 1994. Brent Cross who has held the position since then has often remarked that the continuity resultant from the more than thirty-year tenures of his two predecessors has greatly benefited the system of public works.
Engineer Crandall’s association was informal in the early years of the village; he was officially appointed in May 1927 and paid on a fee-for-service basis.[6] Reappointed annually thereafter, he received a part-time salary of $3,600 in 1961 when he retired having served during the terms of the first thirteen mayors and boards of trustees.[7]
“Village Engineer, Carl Crandall, kept in motion from day to day the work of translating policy into action,” observed Mayor Frederick Marcham near the end of his own thirty-two years in office from 1956 to 1988: [8]
"Carl . . . was aware of all the informal and formal ways of persuasion and manipulation necessary to get things done in public and private life, especially with Cornell and the City of Ithaca. He acted for Village interests as he saw them, without the advice from me or from the Board. . . . He had confidence in his own powers and with every right."[9]
In an interview Frederick Marcham was quoted as saying that along with the other professional employees, meaning the village clerks and the fire and police chiefs, the engineers are “the real village leaders.”[10] Years hence there are residents who still remember Carl Crandall and the fine service he gave them when building a home or filing a variance application while he served as zoning officer in addition to his other duties. They can also recall the smell of ever-present cigars.
The most visible legacy of Carl Crandall’s decades of service are the twenty-one miles of roads in Cayuga Heights, most all of them graded and laid while he was in office beginning with the extension of Highland Road into Cayuga Heights from Cornell Heights in 1922 using gravel dug from the sand bank where Sunset Park is located. In 1931, after several years of planning he supervised the installation of the first section of the all-important sewer system that would prove crucial to village enlargement two decades later. The late Walter Lynn, another civil engineering professor at Cornell who was mayor from 2003 to 2007, strongly advised officials following him to maintain the precious, if unseen, legacy of village water and sewer lines.
Fortunately, Carl Crandall’s career is well documented in the archives of the Cornell University Library, The History Center of Tompkins County, and T. G. Miller, the engineering and surveying company in which he had a major interest downtown in Ithaca on North Aurora Street. Maps kept at Marcham Hall that he drew are still consulted for road, sewer, and water improvements. A few years ago new owners found two tripods Carl Crandall must have left in the attic of 207 Cayuga Heights Road, the handsome Tudor revival home he built for his family in the late 1920s and lived in for the rest of his life. Perhaps he used one of them when he surveyed the original boundaries of Cayuga Heights; to date no one has found the stone posts he placed in the ground to identify the four corners of the then new municipality.
Written by Beatrice Szekely
Village Historian
2016
Endnotes:
[1] Interpretive signage on the Thurston Avenue Bridge, prepared by the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library and “Kirk P. Crandall, Railroad Builder” Industrial World 44, no. 1 (April 11, 1910), 457.
[2] A. J. Himes, Willard Beahan, H. S. Jacoby and F. E. Turneaure, “Charles Lee Crandall, a Memoir, November 1917,” Bulletin of the American Railway Engineering Association 19, no. 201.
[3] S. C. Hollister, William McGuire and J. C. Gebhard, “Carl Crandall, July 22, 1890 – April 25, 1968,” Cornell Faculty Memorial Statements.
[4] Ibid.
[5] A notation on the map indicates it was revised by Robin M. Rogers in September 1977.
[6] History of Village of Cayuga Heights, two pages typewritten from the files of Frederick Marcham, n.d, likely prepared by Village Attorney Charles H. Newman in the early 1930s.
[7] Minutes of the Village of Cayuga Heights Board of Trustees Annual Organizational Meeting, April 3, 1961.
[8] Frederick G. Marcham, Memories of Cayuga Heights, N.Y., March 22, 1988, 14.
[9] Ibid, 14-15.
[10] Lachlan Carmichael, “For Last 30 Years,” an interview with Frederick G. Marcham, Syracuse Herald American, March 23, 1986.
