George Washington Whistler Russian train engraving CLASS OF 1817; CLASS OF 1819 McNeill and Whistler began their lifelong friendship as cadets. After his first wife, Mary Smith, died very young, Whistler married McNeill’s sister, Anna Matilda. Their son, the noted painter James McNeill Whistler, attended West Point without graduating. Both McNeill and Whistler spent their active army careers as topographical engineers. During the 1820s, when West Point graduates were virtually America’s only trained engineers, the government began lending their services to private companies. McNeill and Whistler went to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Other railroad and related engineering projects followed, both before and after they resigned their commissions, Whistler in 1833, McNeill in 1837. Whistler went to Russia in 1842 to supervise construction of the Moscow-St. Petersburg railroad, Russia’s first. Other projects followed, and he never returned. NEXT George Bomford William Gibbs McNeill 1801–1853 Class of 1817 George Washington Whistler 1800–1849 Class of 1819 George Bomford 1782–1848 Class of 1805 Robert Parker Parrott 1804–1877 Class of 1824 Joseph Reid Anderson 1813–1892 Class of 1836
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