Thorp D. Sawyer papers

Thorp D. Sawyer was an American civil engineer who spent at least twenty years of his professional life in South America from the 1910s to the 1940s. He worked on numerous projects, both under the employ of American companies there and independently, at one point establishing his own engineering and consulting company in Bolivia. Sawyer graduated from Cornell University in 1914 with a degree in Civil Engineering. His mother, with whom he corresponded regularly, lived in Tacoma, Washington. Both he and his mother were members of the Church of Christ, Scientists. Upon graduation, Sawyer was recruited by the Guggenheim Brothers to work for their Chile Exploration Company, whose operations were centered around the large copper mine at Chuquicamata in northern Chile. He left for South America in June 1914.

Based in Chuquicamata, Sawyer conducted surveys for construction projects that included pipelines, transmission lines, railroads, and oil spurs. He also worked on engineering projects such as the building of bridges and pumps, and was involved in gold mine speculation. During this time he occasionally worked in Tocopilla, Chile, and traveled to Bolivia, Peru and Argentina. In 1919 he moved to Santiago to become the branch manager for the Allied Construction Machinery Corporation but later that same year, after work was suspended because of political unrest, moved to La Paz to return to the employ of the Guggenheim Brothers and resume mine-related work. In late 1920 he and Ralph Anderson Bennitt opened their own engineering and contracting company, Bennitt y Sawyer Ingenieros, in La Paz. In 1921 the company was called Bennitt, Sawyer & Co. In 1928 he was working in Tocopilla again, this time with nitrate, in association with the Anglo-Chilean Consolidated Nitrate Corporation. Business in Chile became more difficult due to economic and political reasons and in 1932 Sawyer returned to the United States. However, by 1944 he was in Medellin, Colombia, with plans to open a permanent office in Bogota.

Sawyer married a woman named Kitty in 1917 or soon before, and they had several children, the eldest of whom was named Frederick.