Surveys, computations and notes of a California civil engineer working in San Francisco and Colusa County, California

Thaddeus Ransom Brooks was born in Orange County, New York in 1819, and at 16 was accepted as a cadet at West Point Military Academy. By 1855 he was working as a civil engineer in Little Falls, Herkimer County, NY. He came to San Francisco, and became secretary of the Board of City Engineers, that Board having been created by an Act of the Legislature April 25, 1862, for a resurvey of the City. He married Caroline Denison in 1863, and they had two children, Carolina (1865) and Thaddeus R., Jr. (1867.) Brooks was cartographer for the Map of the City of San Francisco, published by the Board of City Engineers in 1865. He authored a Report regarding soundings along the waterfront (1866) which preceded the construction of the seawall. Associated with Henry Casebolt in the project to construct a street railroad (1866), he was chief engineer for the Mission and North Beach Street Railroad, the Potrero and Bay View Railroad, and the Oregon Central Railroad. In early 1875 he opened a civil engineering and surveying business in Colusa, California, and later in that year ran unsuccessfully for the office of state surveyor on the Independent ticket. His wife divorced him in spring 1876. Brooks died of injuries from an accident in Colusa in 1876.

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