Hunt

commission in October 1862 and lived in New
York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore until the close
of the war. He then resumed his law practice in
New Orleans and shortly after his return was ap-
pointed one of the administrators of the Univer-
sity of Louisiana ( 1866-72). He served the Uni-
versity as professor of admiralty and interna-
tional law (1869-79), then as professor of civil
law (1879-83), and was dean of the law depart-
ment from 1872 to 1883. In the latter year he
took his seat in the Forty-eighth Congress to
which he had been elected as a Democrat. He
was a member of the committee on banking and
currency, and on American shipbuilding. In the
discussions on the floor he spoke frequently, his
subjects ranging from steamship subsidies and
French Spoliation Claims to the Nicaragua
Canal and the Mississippi River improvements.
In 1879 Hunt declined appointment as justice
of the supreme court of Louisiana. For many
years he was an examiner of candidates for ad-
mission to the bar. He was one of the founders
of the American Bar Association (1878), chair-
man of its committee on constitution, and chair-
man of its committee on legal education and ad-
mission to the bar. He was city attorney of New
Orleans in Mayor Shakespeare's reform admin-
istration, 1888-92, in which capacity he argued
successfully before the Supreme Court of the
United States the case of Peake vs. New Orleans
(139 [7. S., 342), which involved the liability of
the city for drainage warrants. On Mar. 19,
1908, in recognition of the fiftieth anniversary of
his admission to the bar, his colleagues presented
him with a gold loving-cup. He continued the
active practice of his profession until a few days
before his death. For many years he had been
recognized as the dean of the New Orleans bar.
As a prominent citizen, he was frequently in de-
mand as a speaker. His printed addresses reveal
an interest in Roman law, and in general history ;
a fondness for Latin quotations ; and a pardon-
able pride in his family connections. He died
suddenly at his New Orleans home. He was sur-
vived by three sons ; three daughters died in in-
fancy.

[Records of La. Confed. Soldiers and . . . Com-
mands (1920) , vol. Ill, book I ; Who's Who in America,
1920-21; the La. Hist. Qi*art., July 1922; Harvard
Coll, Class of 1856: Secretary's Report, 1899 (1899);
Memorial of the Harvard Coll. Class of 1856 (iox>6) ;
Biog. Dir. Am. Cong. (1928) ; the Times-Picayune* Aug.

R.P.M.

HUNT, CHARLES WALLACE (Oct. 13,
i84i-Mar. 27, 1911), mechanical engineer and
manufacturer, was born at Candor, Tioga Coun-
ty, N. Y., the sixth child of William Walter and
Elizabeth Bush (Sackett) Hunt He was edu-

Hunt

cated at the Cortland Academy, Homer, N. Y.,
in the general science course, attending the Acad-
emy until about 1861. When he was twenty-
three he went to Yorktown, Va., for the War
Department, to direct the work of caring for the
negro refugees who came through the Federal
lines from the Southern states. After a year of
this work he was forced to return to his home
because of ill health that continued for some time.
In 1868 he purchased and began to operate a
small coal business at West New Brighton,
Staten Island. Dissatisfied with the clumsy and
inefficient methods then in use for handling coal,
he attempted to devise better methods, and in
June 1872 patented a system of coal handling by
which the coal was unloaded from cars or barges
by small cars or skips which rose to inclined
elevated tracks over which they traveled by grav-
ity to all parts of the storage area. The little cars
dumped automatically and were returned to the
barges by the energy stored in weights which
were raised by the cars during the loaded runs.
The development and manufacture of this sys-
tem, which was a practical and immediate suc-
cess, was carried on by the C. W. Hunt Com-
pany, established in 1871 with Hunt as presi-
dent. From the engineering of coal-handling
systems Hunt went into the design and construc-
tion of complete coal storage plants. His success
in this work is indicated by the many large coal
terminals that he constructed throughout the
world These include the coal bases of the United
States Navy at Guantanamo, Cuba, at Puget
Sound, and at Manila; a plant at Copenhagen,
Denmark; a plant for the Lehigh Coal & Iron
Company at West Superior, Wis.; and a plant
for the Calumet & Hecla Company at Lake Lin-
den, Mich. It is said that the equipment de-
signed by Hunt reduced the cost of handling
coal to one-tenth the prior cost of handling. His
methods have since been applied to materials
other than coal and some of the Great Lakes ore
docks are of his design. Turning his attention
to other kinds of material-handling systems, he
was one of the first to manufacture a complete
industrial railway system and probably the first
to make the system of standard units which could
be purchased and combined to form any desired
arrangement of tracks about a factory or shop.
He adopted a narrow gauge for his tracks, made
his car wheels with flanges OB the otttside, de-
signed and built his own locomotives, aD with
the idea of making the most compact and efficient
system possible. He was also a pioneer in the
development of the bticket conveyor systems for
handling coal and ashes In power plants. When
a quantity of his hoisting rope was used for driv-

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