John Henry Ehlers Papers

Born on December 31, 1892, Joseph Henry Ehlers grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, where he attended Hartford Public High School. In 1910, he began undergraduate study at Trinity College, where he graduated as valedictorian and class president in 1914, and also completed his Master's two years later. He went on to complete a Master's in Civil Engineering at the University of California and similarly, one with Cornell. Ehlers dabbled in law at George Washington University and almost twenty years later (1943), completed an additional degree at Southeastern University.

In 1916, while he completed graduate work, he worked as a rodman (or surveyor of new track layout) for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. In 1917, Ehlers worked as a shop drafter with the Bethlehem Steel Bridge Corporation. That same year, he went became a mill inspector in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a year. He relocated to Alaska in 1919 to assist the engineering and construction for the Alaska Juneau Gold Company. In 1920, he joined Pei Yang University (in Tientsin, China) as a professor of structural engineering. There he founded the Phi Tau Phi Scholastic Honor Society, of which he eventually became the secretary. In 1923, Ehlers was named an Honorary Technical Councilor to the Chinese government ministry of communications. He left the university in 1924 and joined the association of Chinese and American Engineers, where he became an editor of the Journal of said association. At one point, Ehlers reported to coastal Shandong to repair broken dikes on the Yellow River.

During the mid-1920's, he briefly worked in real estate in Florida, before travelling to Tokyo, Japan, in 1926 to serve as the U.S. Trade Commissioner, and assisted in the reconstruction of Tokyo’s Yokohama District (1928), after the destructive 1923 earthquake. For the following decades Ehlers worked in construction and law in Washington, D.C., at times in various positions in the federal government. He served on many committees, such as the Society of Civil Engineers (1949-1956). Ehlers was made an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects in 1959, and in 1964 was awarded the Order of the Brilliant Star of the People’s Republic of China (later called Taiwan). In the early 1960’s, Ehlers was a housing coordinator in Yemen and worked with the United Nations as an engineering advisor to the Iraqi Government in Baghdad. He was awarded Trinity College’s Alumni Medals for Excellence in 1974 and wrote and published two books about his travels abroad: “Letters of Travel” (1965) and “Far Horizons: The Travel Diary of an Engineer” (1966). A member of the New York Explorers Club, he traversed the globe in fifteen days in 1977.

Over halfway through his life, Ehlers married Marcellite Edwards Hardy, of Russellville, Kentucky, on February 15, 1945, in Rockville, Maryland, with whom he remained until her death in 1964. Ehlers eventually purchased (1982) the Southern Bank of Kentucky, opening and maintaining it as a museum in the name and honor of his late wife, until his death in June of 1988 at the age of 95.