THOMPSON, ATWELL

Architect, engineer and surveyor.   Atwell Thompson, a son of William Thompson, of Granard, Co. Longford, and brother of JAMES CALDWELL THOMPSON JAMES CALDWELL THOMPSON , was born in Granard on 24 May 1864.(1)  He had a BE degree from the Royal University of Ireland and appears to have practised as an architect in Granard during the 1880s, when his brother James was his pupil.   According to his own preferred account of his life he had studied engineering at Oxford, taking the highest honours, and had subsequently worked on 'railroad construction and maintenance, city engineering and topography', while it was 'with a recommendation from the English crown' that he eventually left Europe.   What is certain is that he emigrated to the United States in 1892 and worked for many years from 1895 onwards on the creation of the national military park which commemorated the Civil War battle of Shiloh, Tennessee.

All information in this entry not otherwise accounted for is from James Caldwell Thompson's application for membership of the RIAI,  IAA, RIAI office archives (Acc. 93/136), membership forms 1878-1909 (extremely fragile), and Timothy B. Smith, This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and the Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park (University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 36.


(1) www.familysearch.org (last visited 16 Dec 2008).