Collinson Pierrepont Edwards Burgwyn (5 April 1852–23 February 1915), civil engineer, was born in Jackson, North Carolina, the son of Henry King Burgwyn, a successful planter, and Anna Greenough Burgwyn. His mother belonged to a distinguished New England family, and his father had family roots in both New England and North Carolina. Several of Burgwyn's elder brothers were educated in the North, and the Civil War proved particularly difficult for the family because of its many ties to New England. One brother died fighting for the Confederacy at Gettysburg, and another was wounded and captured in 1864 at Cold Harbor.
The family moved from North Carolina to Boston immediately after the Civil War. About a year later the family relocated to Richmond, where Burgwyn attended a private school before returning to Boston to enter the Boston Latin School, from which he graduated in 1869. He then enrolled in Harvard University, where he won prizes for his Latin poetry before graduating in 1874. Burgwyn went on to receive a civil engineering degree in 1876 from Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School.
C. P. E. Burgwyn returned to Richmond and in 1877 entered the competition for the commission to design a westward expansion of Hollywood Cemetery. Although young and inexperienced, he produced a winning design that showed attention to detail, relied on the natural topography, and was compatible with the original 1848 plan of John Notman. In the autumn of 1878 Burgwyn supervised the installation of Richmond's first telephone lines, stretching across rooftops and through trees from the state penitentiary to the central business district.
For about two years Burgwyn worked for the United States Coast Survey on the development of waterways between Norfolk and eastern North Carolina and into the Dismal Swamp. After he returned to Richmond he was one of the engineers employed by the federal government until 1891 on river and harbor improvements on the James River. Burgwyn published several articles, complete with detailed information on geology, topography, climate, and water power, extolling the potential of the James River for commercial development. He later served as a consultant on several dock construction proposals.
By 1886 Burgwyn was working for the city engineer, Wilfred Emory Cutshaw, with whom he supervised the construction of the new city hall. Bypassing the city's contractors, the Richmond city council gave Cutshaw and Burgwyn the unusual task of constructing a public building with the use of day labor. Through this project Burgwyn evidently gained an interest in the plight of the working man, and by 1888 he had become the principal of the Virginia Mechanics' Institute, a post he held for more than twenty years. The institute had begun as a trade school but expanded to include basic academic courses.
In 1887 Burgwyn laid out the first section of Monument Avenue, working as a consulting engineer for Otway Slaughter Allen, the developer of the property. Burgwyn's knowledge of Boston's Commonwealth Avenue, a broad boulevard of stately homes, and Monument Place in Baltimore, which Allen himself admired, probably influenced Burgwyn's design of axial streets with treed medians crossing at a traffic circle. He traveled to Paris to inspect Marius-Jean-Antonin Mercié's equestrian statue of Robert Edward Lee before it was packed and shipped to Richmond for placement on Monument Avenue. Burgwyn's glowing reports of the statue's dignity, especially when compared with famous equestrian monuments in European capitals, were published in Richmond's newspapers.
Burgwyn's early interest in literature and poetry emerged again in 1889 when he published The Huguenot Lovers: A Tale of the Old Dominion. The novel dealt with a young Boston woman who traveled to the South and was persuaded by the gallantry of its people to alter her preconceived ideas about the Civil War, after which she fell in love with a former Confederate officer. Burgwyn's writing, though sometimes melodramatic, offers articulate descriptions of the Richmond area during Reconstruction. In 1894 he published The Lost Diamond, a play on a similar theme.
During the 1890s Burgwyn continued his efforts to develop the Richmond area as an industrial and commercial center. He served as president of the Virginia Dredging and Dock Company, the Petersburg Iron Works Company, and the Bermuda Hundred Construction Company, which built a new line of the Farmville and Powhatan Railroad. Burgwyn became vice president of the Warwick Park Transportation Company, which developed a park on the bank of the James River four miles below Richmond and transported visitors to and from the park by steamboat. He was also a director of the Virginia Navigation Company, the successor to the Virginia Steamboat Company, which ran steamboats between Norfolk and Richmond. By 1902 Burgwyn had designed and supervised the construction of a hydroelectric plant on the Meherrin River in Emporia.
Burgwyn's vision for Richmond's development influenced the location of the Main Street railway station. When a large terminal was being planned on a site north of the city, the Chamber of Commerce hired him to prepare preliminary sketches for a downtown passenger station. Burgwyn's sketches convinced officials of the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad and the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad of the advantages of building closer to the city's center, and Main Street Station was the result.
On 15 October 1884 Burgwyn married Rosa Bayley Higginbotham, of Henrico County. They had no children, and she died on 30 April 1909. In his later years Burgwyn lived at the Westmoreland Club, of which he was a longtime member. Collinson Pierrepont Edwards Burgwyn died at the Richmond home of a nephew on 23 February 1915 after two months' illness and was buried in Hollywood Cemetery.
Sources Consulted:
Biographical information and newspaper clippings, vertical files, The Valentine, Richmond; Burgwyn Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, Univesity of North Caroline, Chapel Hill; Burgwyn letters in The Valentine and various collections, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond; family information in Archibald K. Davis, Boy Colonel of the Confederacy: The Life and Times of Henry King Burgwyn, Jr. (1985); Marriage Register, Henrico County, Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); Mary H. Mitchell, Hollywood Cemetery: The History of a Southern Shrine (1999), 98–101, 121 (portrait, plate 31); Virginia Capital Bicentennial Commission, untitled typescript on history of the telephone system in Richmond, 1879&ndash1937, in Sketches of Societies and Institutions, Together with Descriptions of Phases of Social, Political, and Economic Development in Richmond, Virginia (1937), pt. 36; Carden C. McGehee Jr., "The Planning, Sculpture, and Architecture of Monument Avenue, Richmond, Virginia" (master's thesis, UVA School of Architecture, 1980); Sarah Shields Driggs, Richard Guy Wilson, and Robert P. Winthrop, Richmond's Monument Avenue (2001), 31, 33–34, 48, 99–100, 107, 138–139; The City on the James: Richmond, Virginia (1893), 59–60, 115–116; principal professional publications include Report of Colonel C. P. E. Burgwyn, Civil Engineer, on the Natural Advantages and Water-Power Facilities of the City of Manchester and the County of Chesterfield, with Accompanying Maps (1888), and Report on Terminal, Dock and Manufacturing Facilities (1888); obituaries in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 24 Feb. 1915, and Richmond Virginian, 24 Feb. 1915; funeral reported in Richmond Virginian, 26 Feb. 1915.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Sarah Shields Driggs.
How to cite this page:
Sarah Shields Driggs, "Collinson Pierrepont Edwards Burgwyn (1852–1915)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2001 http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Burgwyn_C_P_E(, accessed [today's date]).
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