Waring, George

Col. George Edwin Waring Jr.'s career as a sanitation engineer bridged the primitive waste collection and disposal practices of the 19th century and the sophisticated, technologically intensive methods of the 20th century. He is perhaps the most recognizable face of municipal sanitation in the late 19th century.

Waring, from Poundridge, New York, was a successful scientific agriculturalist, managing farms for Horace Greeley and Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted subsequently hired him to work as a drainage engineer in the construction of Central Park, after which Waring worked on a variety of drainage and sewerage projects nationwide until the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War. He joined the Union Army as a major; commissioned a colonel in 1862, he left the military in 1865 to build drainage and sewerage systems along the East Coast, including in Ogdenburg and Saratoga Springs, New York, and Lenox, Massachusetts. During the 1870s, this work brought him some recognition as a municipal engineer.