18th Century Engineer
by: Wes Stone as told to Gail Lang

A military engineer's position in the 18th century can be reduced down to two things, building and reducing forts. In the 18th century, the concept of the civil engineer was pretty boring. There were builders, but a trained engineer wouldn't bother himself with that sort of thing. I ran across a wonderful quote in an 18th century engineer book. It said, "The next chapter will concern civil engineering and it is not expected for the military engineer to qualify in this area. So if you desire you may skip to chapter nine." They were just a bit snobbish about it. A classically trained military engineer was just that. What we did was construct forts; and if we are attacking forts, our job was to determine the most effective method of destroying the fort.

You had to know about architecture since an engineer also designed the buildings inside the fort. The 18th century church down in Ebenezer, Georgia built by Debrahm wasn't called civil engineering. It was referred to as architectural work. The highest level of engineers, the really sophisticated engineers in Europe, built the royal palaces and the armories. They had a real military use, yet were extremely well designed from an architectural point of view.

There are three basic levels of engineers — the lowest level that built houses and such mundane buildings, the military engineer who built forts, and the top level that never associated with the others, the castle builders. None of these engineers really had the social position we associate with engineers today though. Today, an engineer is a pretty elevated and respected position. In the 18th century there was a real prejudice against men who worked with their hands rather than their minds. A Gentleman didn't do that. He hired people of the middle or lower class who labor. An engineer ranked in there somewhere around a master stone mason or a master carver. It wasn't such a high position.

Over here in the Colonies, it became a new point. We know that William Debrahm, the engineer that developed our fort, was a German trained engineer. He'd gone to all the schools and served in several campaigns in Europe. He had a conversion experience in 1748. Catholic born and raised, he turned to an evangelical Lutheran movement. This presented a problem because his king was not only catholic but the Holy Roman Emperor. He had to give up his profession and move.

He hired on to lead a group of protestant settlers down to Georgia. They founded the town of Ebenezer, Georgia on the Savannah river. His job was to run the farms and get the town going, but he was unsuccessful. He was a miserable failure as a colonist. He couldn't farm. He couldn't do anything so he returned to engineering and began to hire himself out to the governor of Georgia to improve the defenses of Georgia. Eventually, he was hired by the governor of South Carolina to do much the same thing. He was virtually the only engineer east of the Mississippi in the 1750's.

In 1742 a tremendous hurricane wiped out much of downtown Charlestowne. They needed someone to help rebuild it, to rebuild the bastion walls, the seafront. And here was the only engineer in the southeast surveying land down in Georgia. That's how he managed to get back into military engineering and how he came to live in South Carolina. They liked his work so much that the governor of South Carolina hired him as the chief military engineer of the colonies. There was no category for chief military engineer so they gave him the position of Surveyor General and then sent him to build forts.

The image to the right is Wes Stones' wife and child fully enjoying their experience in history.

He was a wonderful Charlestowne character. His house exists today as an historical site on the southeast corner of Church and Tradd Steets. Just like other 18th century Engineers, he was very precise, very detailed oriented. He spent one year, raising and lowering the windows of his house in various combinations and noting the temperatures to decide the perfect combination for each season.

The 18th century mind set differed from ours. There was no room for anything random. Everything was cause and effect, directly related, and very logical. An engineer took that to the most extreme position. Do this and this will happen; it must happen. They probably weren't very pleasant people to be around, always picking at the smallest details. Can you imagine his wife, windows opening and closing, opening and closing, repeatedly for a year?!?

If you know the Fort Moultrie area, the fort was designed by a Debrahm. It ran in the family. Families passed down trades to the children. His nephew, Ferdinand Debrahm came over from Germany to assist William Debrahm with a survey of Georgia and a map of Georgia and South Carolina. When the Revolution came up, the uncle stayed loyal to the king. The nephew took on a different attitude. So they were virtually against each other at that point, living in the same city, blood relations, yet on opposite sides in the Revolution. Then the British came to attack Charleston. Ferdinand was out building those palmetto defenses on Sullivan's Island, and William was inside hoping they weren't going to bombard his house. He was a fascinating character. It's characteristic of history repeating itself. The Revolutionary War pit family members against each other just as later in the Civil War: brother against brother, father against son, uncle against nephew.

We don't know about the design of Old Fort Dorchester. I have my suspicion. It may have been Debrahm who laid it out. It is very interesting, created entirely from pressed seashells. Pretty common. The fort built at Old Dorchester State Park isn't a very complicated design, no ditches and outer defenses. The outline is classical European, simple enough that someone who was not versed in European fort structure could still build it. During the time this was built in 1757, Debrahm was on the payroll as the colonies' engineer, so we can be fairly certain in guessing that he could have built this fort.

He designed the forts, but he didn't necessarily oversee or participate in their construction. He drew them out and marked the appropriate lines. Then a construction crew composed of whoever was handy built the fort following the instructions left by the engineer. They got a local farmer or two together to build the fort. And he'd be on his way again to begin the design on another fort.

At Fort Loudoun we talked a lot about the lives of the soldiers, who they were, what they ate and what they did; but we realized we weren't saying anything about our biggest resource, the fort. That's why we put together the area focusing on the engineer to help understand the primary artifact which was so visible, how it worked, how it evolved. It wasn't built as planned. It should have been a stone fort, a huge stone fort out in the western part of South Carolina; but it never quite turned out like that. Why? A whole set of political circumstances worked together against it.

Fort Loudoun is just south and east of Knoxville, Tennessee. This territory was part of South Carolina in the 18th century. The original company that we represent was formed from Oglethorpe's troops from Georgia. In 1749 the officers were given a choice of retiring or taking up commission in the Independent Company. Several choose to become officers in the Independent Company. Even some of the enlisted men asked to join. These companies, three of them, were based in Charleston. In fact, the barracks was right behind the courthouse at the Four Corners, downtown Charleston. It would have been a very familiar site in the streets of Charleston in the late 1740's - 1750's to see the British troops walking the streets. When the British decided to build a fort up on the other side of the mountain, they drew recruits from all three of these companies to form a composite company and sent it out to the west.