Charles Henry Dimmock (18 October 1831–28 or 29 March 1873), civil engineer, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and was the son of Charles Dimmock, an army officer who during the Civil War served as the chief of ordnance for Virginia, and Henrietta Maria Fraser Johnson Dimmock. The family moved to Portsmouth, Virginia, late in the 1830s and then early in the 1840s to Richmond, where Dimmock attended the Richmond Academy. He worked as a civil engineer for several railroads, including the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad Company and the Philadelphia and Baltimore Railroad Company, based in Baltimore. On 12 May 1857 Dimmock married Emily Louisa Moale, of that city. They had one daughter and one son. In 1859 Dimmock traveled to New Mexico Territory as a topographer with the United States Topographical Bureau. He returned to Baltimore shortly before his wife died on 12 December 1859. Earlier he had read law in Baltimore, and by 1860 he had opened a practice there.
Civil War Service
After the Virginia convention voted to secede from the United States in April 1861, Dimmock returned to Richmond. He supervised construction of defenses at Fort Norfolk, at Craney Island near Portsmouth, and at Roanoke Island in Dare County, North Carolina, before he received a commission on 17 May as a captain in the Corps of Engineers of the Provisional Army of Virginia. In mid-October, Dimmock was assigned to Gloucester Point on the York River. Noting his ability, his superiors recommended him early in 1862 for a position in the nascent Confederate Corps of Engineers. Dimmock mustered in at the lower rank of first lieutenant. On 12 February 1862 he protested his demotion in a letter to the Confederate secretary of war and on 18 March won reinstatement as captain.
In May 1862 Dimmock was dispatched to build obstructions in the Appomattox River near Petersburg in response to the Union campaign on the Peninsula. After initial surveys conducted by others in August 1862, Dimmock began the design and then directed the construction of a system of defenses—ten miles of fortifications and fifty-five batteries around the city of Petersburg—that would later be known as the Dimmock Line. He required a large labor force, and slaves made up for the shortage of white Confederate manpower. Having completed the project by the middle of 1863, Dimmock had begun supervising the construction of a new bridge across the Appomattox River by July. In Richmond on 14 October 1863 he married Elizabeth Lewis Selden. They had four daughters and one son.
In honor of Dimmock's dedication to the defense of their city, Petersburg residents presented him with a stallion and riding equipment in January 1864. Later that year the Dimmock Line held against a Union attack on 9 June. Dimmock was reassigned in December to the Army of Northern Virginia, with which he served until the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865. Dimmock took the amnesty oath on 25 May and returned to Richmond, where he resumed his civilian life as an architect and civil engineer. He tried his hand at literary pursuits and published a twenty-four-page poem, The Modern: A Fragment (1866), in which he condemned the vapid nature of modern society.
Monument to the Confederate Dead
With the cessation of hostilities, Richmonders quickly mobilized a campaign for Confederate memorialization. A bazaar held by the Hollywood Memorial Association of the Ladies of Richmond in April 1867 raised $18,000 for the purpose of erecting a monument in Hollywood Cemetery for all Confederate soldiers. Dimmock submitted a design to the selection committee in June. He envisioned a ninety-foot-tall pyramid, made of local stone, held together without mortar, and perhaps covered in creeping ivy. The Hollywood Memorial Association selected his design and laid the cornerstone on 3 December 1868. To great fanfare spectators watched a convict climb ninety feet to the top to place the capstone on 8 November 1869. The pyramid became an enduring symbol of the Lost Cause and a tourist destination at the historic cemetery into the twenty-first century.
Civil Engineer
By 1870 Dimmock had established an architectural firm on Main Street with his younger brother, Marion Johnson Dimmock. On 27 April 1870 the overloaded courtroom floor at the Capitol collapsed, killing about sixty people. Dimmock served on the three-member committee that the General Assembly named to assess the damage and recommend a course of action. In its report presented on 17 May, the committee proposed repairing the Capitol rather than constructing a new building. The assembly granted funds the next month for the suggested repairs and construction.
As part of a slate of Conservative candidates, Dimmock won election as city engineer of Richmond on 26 May 1870. His duties included maintaining and paving streets and sidewalks, maintaining sewers, building bridges, planting trees, and supervising school construction. In March 1871 a group of local builders brought charges of incompetence and price-gouging against Dimmock, but the city council quickly exonerated him and the following year reelected him to the post of engineer. Early in 1872 the Hollywood Memorial Association sent Dimmock to Gettysburg to monitor the ongoing exhumation of Confederate dead from the battlefield. His report to the organization that April expressed his shock at the desecration of the graves by local farmers and recommended that the removal of remains to Hollywood continue.
By that time Dimmock's health had begun to deteriorate from stomach cancer. In January 1873 he traveled to New York City for an operation. His illness worsened, however, and during the night of 28–29 March 1873 Charles Henry Dimmock died at his father-in-law's home in Gloucester County. He was buried at Hollywood Cemetery, in Richmond. As a testament to his civic service, Richmond's mayor closed government offices at noon. More than a century after his death a parkway in Colonial Heights, near Petersburg, was named for Dimmock.
Sources Consulted:
Charles H. Dimmock Papers (including birth date in MS biography and death date of 29 Mar. 1873 on copy of 1865 parole), Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va.; correspondence, lines of verse, drawings, commonplace book, and diary (1859) in Charles H. Dimmock Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va.; Baltimore Sun, 16 May 1857; Marriage Register, Richmond City (1863), Bureau of Vital Statistics, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 30 Mar. 1871; Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers (1861–1865), War Department Collection of Confederate Records, Record Group 109, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1880–1901); Mary H. Mitchell, Hollywood Cemetery: The History of a Southern Shrine (1999), portrait tipped in between 34 and 35; A. Wilson Greene, Civil War Petersburg: Confederate City in the Crucible of War (2006); Gloucester Co. Death Register (died on 29 Mar. 1873); obituaries in Richmond Daily Dispatch, Richmond Enquirer (with variant birth date of 31 Oct. 1831), and Richmond Daily Whig, all 1 Apr. 1873 (died "Friday last," 28 Mar. 1873), and in Baltimore Sun, 2 Apr. 1873 (died "on Friday").
Image courtesy of Library of Virginia, Visual Studies Collection.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Adrienne E. Robertson.
How to cite this page:
Adrienne E. Robertson,"Charles Henry Dimmock (1831–1873)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2015 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Dimmock_Charles_Henry, accessed [today's date]).
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