Theodore Dehone Judah was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut back in 1826 to Henry and Mary. The family moved to Troy, New York where the attended the Rensselaer Institute. At 21 he married Anna Pierce, it was the first wedding performed at St. James Episcopal Church of Greenfield, Massachusetts.
In 1853, he was elected a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, at that time there were fewer than 800 civil engineers in the United States. The next year he was hired by the Sacramento valley Railroad, under his direction it became the first common carrier railroad built west of the Mississippi River.
In 1859, he was sent to Washington D.C. to lobby for a transcontinental railway system. On July 1, 1862, President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act into law. Having accomplished his mission, he went back home. However, he never saw it complete as he died 6 years before it was finished from yellow fever.
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