Elihu Roosevelt Swain

The Rogers Building (1866-1938), the first building on the M.I.T. campus, c. 1901

Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain, a descendant of Vermont apple farmers who was born Elihu Witherspoon Swain, was an engineer and founder of the Swain Bridge Company, which designed and supervised construction of, by some estimates, half of all the railroad bridges on Earth. He took a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at 18 and set up the Department of Civil Engineering at Cornell University at 22. By this point, he already had several important patents on railroad bridges and safety mechanisms that made him a millionaire, founding the Swain family fortune. He spoke several languages and was a personal friend of many heads of state. He built his home in Galen, Vermont, the town of his ancestors, among an apple orchard of two hundred acres on a mountain top. It was later used as a sheltered home for his descendants, the deformed twins Wilbur and Eliza Swain. They considered him the most intelligent of their known ancestors.

The mansion contained trap doors, sliding panels, peepholes, and secret passageways and tunnels, including one that led to his own mausoleum, later discovered by the twins who used it extensively for their clandestine studies. He changed his original middle name to sound more aristocratic when he enrolled at M.I.T., perhaps inspiring Wilbur and Eliza's social scheme of changing everyone's middle name to create artificial extended families. In his later years he became obese and "died of his fatness" at home during a dinner given in honor of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Thomas Alva Edison. His mausoleum was built with think granite walls, a slate roof, and large doors, with his body in a lead casket. A bronze funerary urn in his mausoleum had been intended for the ashes of his wife, who instead chose to be buried in New York City. Decades after his death, an oil picture of him was still hung over the mantelpiece of the library in his mansion.