World-renowned engineer James Buchanan Eads was born May 23, 1820, in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, and moved to St. Louis with his family in 1833. He embarked on a successful steamboat salvage business in 1842, and during the Civil War he was awarded a federal government contract to build ironclad gunboats. Soon after the close of the war, he began work on designing a bridge to span the Mississippi River at St. Louis. Completed in 1874, the Illinois and St. Louis Bridge (later known as the Eads Bridge) was deemed a great engineering accomplishment. Eads then designed the South Pass Jetties to connect New Orleans with the ocean. He later devised a plan to construct a ship railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This ship railway was never constructed. He died March 8, 1887, in Nassau, Bahama Islands. Eads married Martha Dillon in 1845, and they had three children. His wife died in 1852, and in 1854 he married Eunice Hagerman, a widow.