Allen Hazen papers

The papers of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) civil engineering graduate Allen Hazen contain records of his career as a consulting engineer, specializing in water supply and purification. The typescript by Dennis Sebian of his Hazen biography "Pioneer Engineering" in box 26 of the collection provides a detailed analysis of Hazen's importance in the discipline of water engineering in the early twentieth century.

Allen Hazen advised a large number of cities and towns in the United States and globally on water supply and sewerage problems from the late 1890s until his death in 1930. Hazen's consulting activities are documented in reports by Hazen and members of his civil engineering firm, Hazen and Whipple, for over 300 projects in the United States, Canada, and South America, 1895-1935. Also included is material on water filtration processes and systems designs, including a photograph album of construction views of pumping stations and filtration sites in the United States and of the Panama Canal locks.

Travel diaries and letters to his family and notes and sketches provide details about Hazen's visits to sewage and waterworks in Europe and the western United States. Also included are student notes.

From 1889 to 19892 he was employed by the Lawrence Experiment Station, Lawrence, Massachusetts and there are several research notebooks from that work included in this collection. There is also material related to his attendance at the World Engineering Congress in Tokyo, Japan in 1929, of note is a photograph album of that trip (box 23).

The papers also contain personal and family correspondence of Allen Hazen, personal and business account books, congratulatory letters upon his marriage, and a two-volume unpublished biography of his daughter, Ruth Hazen Hopkins. There is genalogical information about early Hazen relatives in Vermont.