Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Henry Farnam was an American philanthropist and railroad president. He was born in Scipio, New York, and grew up working on his father's farm. By his teenage years, he had begun studying mathematics on his own and in 1820 he gained employment initially as a camp cook on the Erie Canal. Under the wing of Benjamin Wright, America's most famous Civil Engineer at the time and a man who encouraged many young men to study Civil Engineering, Henry Farnam learned Surveying and was soon employed as a Surveyor on the Erie Canal.