472 
MONTGOMERY CUNNINGHAM MEIGS. 
and most abundant method of supply by damming the 
Potomac river at the Great Falls, some sixteen miles from 
the capital. This plan, approved by the War Department, 
was adopted by Congress, with the grant of liberal appro¬ 
priations, and the projector of the enterprise became captain 
in the Engineer Corps, and to him was assigned the duty of 
designing and constructing the Potomac aqueduct. The 
watercourse of this great work was made to pass over sev¬ 
eral bridges, one of which surmounts a chasm 100 feet deep. 
Its single arch of 220 feet span still remains, I believe, the 
largest stone arch hitherto constructed. 
During the prosecution of this important work (which 
occupied about ten years) Captain Meigs was also placed in 
charge, as supervising engineer, of the north and south ex¬ 
tensions of the national Capitol and of the construction of 
its crowning iron dome, as well as of the northward exten¬ 
sion of the General Post Office building. 
Here he grew to a certain acquaintance with architecture 
which he could not have acquired only as an engineer. It 
is scarcely given to men to attain perfection in each of 
many different things and of opposite natures, and the sci¬ 
ence of the engineer and the sesthetic side of architecture are 
such opposites, but General Meigs possessed a sound pro¬ 
fessional knowledge of the principles of construction, and in 
this had a most important part of an architect’s knowledge. 
He joined to it the agreeable talents of a more than ordinary 
skill in drawing and sketching in color, and his architect¬ 
ural work always and to the end of his life had to him an 
especial interest. 
If there had been no civil war we might never have heard 
of him, except as a meritorious officer of engineers, who, 
in the routine of his charge, superintended various public 
works, and who, possessing the accomplishments of an 
unusually skilled amateur artist, designed, in conjunction 
with various architects, some of the prominent buildings of 
the capital. 
But there was a civil war—a something which is already 
only history, perhaps, to the younger men who hear me— 
