Channing Moore Bolton (24 January 1843–6 December 1922), civil engineer, was born in Richmond, the son of James Bolton, a surgeon and ophthalmologist, and Anna Maria Harrison Bolton. He was educated in private schools in Richmond and matriculated at the University of Virginia in 1860, where he took Latin, French, and a mathematics course that included surveying.

Bolton entered Confederate service in 1861 and spent the first year of the war helping lay out the defenses around the city of Richmond. He worked as a surveyor in 1862 and became resident engineer during construction of the forty-eight-mile Piedmont Railroad between Danville and Greensboro, North Carolina. In the retreat from Gettysburg in July 1863 Bolton assisted in the construction and subsequent demolition of a pontoon bridge over the Potomac River that enabled the Confederate army to elude pursuing Northern forces. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 1st Regiment Confederate Engineer Troops on 6 April 1864, with the commission to date from 29 March of that year, and he remained with the Army of Northern Virginia until the war ended. Frequent references to him after the war as Major Bolton came after he won the rank of major in the United Confederate Veterans.

Bolton began his career in civil engineering as surveyor and engineer during the construction of the Clover Hill Railroad near Richmond. During 1866 and 1867 he directed the construction of a 600-foot tunnel under Gamble's Hill in Richmond that connected the Richmond and Danville and the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroads. Bolton worked from 1867 to 1869 as resident engineer of the Louisville, Cincinnati, and Lexington Railroad, and he held the same post for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad from 1869 to 1874, during which he participated in the surveying and construction of a railroad line through the mountains between Covington and White Sulphur Springs, worked on other construction projects in western Virginia and West Virginia, and located the route for the line between Richmond and Newport News. During 1872 and 1873 he supervised the construction of a tunnel 4,000 feet in length under Church Hill in Richmond.

From 1876 to 1879 Bolton was in charge of the construction of a canal around the cascades of the Columbia River in Oregon, and he conducted surveys of the entrances to Coos Bay and the Coquille River. He was president of the Richmond City Street Railway in 1879 and 1880 and at the same time supervised construction of a line from Richmond to Lynchburg for the Richmond and Alleghany Railroad. During the next two years he lived in Greenville, Mississippi, serving as engineer and superintendent of the Greenville, Columbus, and Birmingham Railroad. Bolton rejoined the Richmond and Danville in 1882, first as its chief engineer and subsequently as chief engineer of its successor, the Southern Railway Company. He was elected to the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1888 and lived in Washington, D.C., until 1895.

Bolton retired in 1895 and moved to a farm near Charlottesville, where he invested in several businesses. He became president of the Piedmont Real Estate and Loan Company when it was incorporated in 1904, and he served as president of the Charlottesville Canning Company, a director of the Charlottesville Ice Company, and a member of the board of the Jefferson National Bank. In 1906 Bolton supervised the construction of the Church of Our Savior, a small stone Episcopal church at his farm, and he served as president of the local street railway, the Charlottesville and Albemarle Railway, from 1902 to 1908 and again from 1912 to 1913. In 1907, probably because of his experience with the two Richmond railroad tunnels, he worked briefly for the Northern Pacific and the Chicago, Milwaukee, and Saint Paul Railroads in Montana on the construction of two tunnels through the Rocky Mountains.

Bolton married Lizzie Calhoun Campbell on 17 February 1874. They had two daughters before she died on 6 October 1889. On 6 June 1894 he married Alma Ann Baldwin. They had one daughter and one son. Channing Moore Bolton died in Charlottesville on 6 December 1922 and was buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.

Sources Consulted:
Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography (1915), 3:290–291 (portrait); Henry Carrington Bolton and Reginald Pelham Bolton, The Family of Bolton in England and America, 1100–1894: A Study in Genealogy (1895), 403–404 and chart opp. 397; 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.; Bolton's description of 1873 Church Hill tunnel project and his technical drawings in Henry S. Drinker, Tunneling, Explosive Compounds, and Rock Drills, 2d ed., rev. (1882), 581–588, 664, 704, 737–738; Albert E. Walker, ed., "Charlottesville Virginia: 'The Athens of the South,'" Charlottesville Daily Progress Historical and Industrial Magazine (June 1906): 16, 18, 24; Jefferson Randolph Kean, "'Forward is the Motto of the Day': Electric Street Railways in Charlottesville, 1893–1936," Magazine of Albemarle County History 37/38 (1979/1980): 114, 119–132, 166, 169; obituaries in Charlottesville Daily Progress, 6 Dec. 1922, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 7 Dec. 1922; memorial in Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers 86 (1923): 1633–1635 (gives variant death date of 11 Dec. 1922).

Photograph in Tyler, Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography, 3:291.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Martin S. Lane.

How to cite this page:
Martin S. Lane, Channing Moore Bolton (1843–1922)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2001 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Bolton_Channing_Moore, accessed [today's date]).

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