John Anderson (c. 1790 - 1834) was an early American military surveyor and a leading member of the nascent Corps of Topographical Engineers. Born in Connecticut, his family appears to have moved to Vermont in his childhood. After a year of study at Middlebury College, he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1806 and graduated the following year, being appointed as an artilleryman. He was assigned to the Michigan Territory to survey a course for a road from Detroit to the Miami River in Ohio (later known as Hull's Road). Anderson appears to have left the military in 1811 but was called back to serve as the Chief of Bureau or senior topographer for a new Corps of Topographical Engineers formed in preparation for the War of 1812. He served as an artillery officer under Gen. Hull and was among those captured by the British at Detroit in December 1812, being briefly imprisoned in Canada afterwards and then paroled and returned to Washington, D.C., to which he carried Hull's account of the battle at Detroit and subsequent surrender. For the remainder of the war, Anderson worked as a topographer for the Army, including a return to the Detroit-Miami River road project. When the war with the British ended, the Corps of Topographers was disbanded, but Anderson and a Maj. Roberdeau were kept on to survey Lake Champlain and the northern frontier of the U.S. But in 1816, Congress established a small peacetime corps of military topographers. Anderson continued his work for the corps while residing in Detroit; he married in 1818 and became a prominent figure among the professional class in the growing city. From 1825 to 1833, he undertook coastal surveys for fortifications in New England as well as survey of the Hudson River. He then was tasked with surveys of a canal in southern Michigan and the coasts of Lake Huron, but he died in 1834, roughly a year after the death of his only child, John. Anderson's widow, Julia, survived him and, upon her death, bequeathed land and property to establish a Mariner's Church in Detroit (completed 1849), which still stands. For more information on Anderson, see the article by Rusty Davis, 'The Short Life of Colonel John Anderson of the US Topographical Engineers and His Impact on Early Michigan,' published in 2020 in the Michigan Historical Review.
