Newman, John William

John William Newman (May 23, 1845 - 1914) was a surveyor and civil engineer active in Florida in the late 19th century. Sources differ on his birth date and year, but he was born 'on a plantation' in Orange County, Virginia. He joined the Confederate army at the start of the U.S. Civil War while only 25 and, showing a proficiency for mathematics, was assigned to the engineering corps, reaching the rank of captain by the end of the conflict. After the war he moved to Kentucky and ran a military school called Forrest Academy. He married Mary Barbour in 1867 and had four children with her, but after she died in 1884, he relocated to Florida and remarried (Louise or Lula Kabler), having four additional children. In the early 1890s, Newman was employed by Henry Plant, of the Plant System of railroads and steamships, as a civil engineer. He was tasked by Plant in 1892 with conducting a survey of the Everglades, which were still poorly mapped at the time, as part of the 'Ingraham Everglades Expedition,' named for the president of Plant's South Florida Railroad, James E. Ingraham. The expedition traveled from Fort Myers to Miami with the stated goal of surveying the land and planning out a railway route, though its implicit goal was also to determine whether the Everglades could be drained and put to agricultural use, as Plant and his associates had done further north in Florida. Newman produced an important map of the Everglades upon the expedition's completion and then dedicated himself to the monumental task of draining the Everglades, which he was convinced was possible (Ingraham, in the meantime, returned to northern Florida and convinced Henry Flagler to expand his expanding railway network - soon redubbed the Florida East Coast Railway - all the way down the coast of the state). In 1896, Newman moved to Bellair (west of Tampa near Clearwater) and with his family and oversaw drainage operations in South Florida, serving as the Engineer for the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund. From 1905 to 1911, he managed canal and dredging operations on both the east and west coasts of South Florida, including Fort Lauderdale and Caloosahatchee (near Fort Myers).