Jefferson wrote, "We are sometimes disposed to think with regret that we have been born an age too soon for the luminous advance of sciences of which we see the dawn." For Dan Mahon, greenway coordinator for Albemarle County, Crozet was a Renaissance man - like Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and others of the era. "I don't know what people were eating in their cereal bowls back then," Mahon said.

Benoit Claudius Crozet was born either in late 1789 or early 1790 in a town in southeast France. He graduated in 1807 from Ecole Polytechnique and became an artillery officer in Napoleon's army. After France's ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812, the Russians captured Crozet during the historic Battle of Borodino. Crozet remained a prisoner for two years, though he was befriended by and lived with a Russian nobleman during this period.

In 1816, he and his wife immigrated to the United States, where Crozet became a professor of engineering at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

In 1823 Crozet became principal engineer and surveyor for the Public Works of Virginia. He and his family moved to Richmond. He resigned this post in 1832, partly because of frustration with Virginia's stubborn focus on river and canal transportation rather than railroads, and became first chief engineer for Louisiana.

In the years that followed, Crozet served as president of Jefferson College in Louisiana and as New Orleans' civil engineer.

In 1837 he returned as Virginia's chief engineer. He became the first president of the board of visitors for Virginia Military Institute.

In 1849, he was appointed chief engineer of the newly incorporated Blue Ridge Railroad and charged with building a railroad from Albemarle County to Augusta County. Between these points loomed the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Crozet engineered and supervised the construction of four tunnels: Little Rock, Brooksville, Greenwood and Blue Ridge. At the time of its construction, the Blue Ridge Tunnel was said to be the longest railroad tunnel in the world.

Crozet died in 1864 and was buried in Richmond. In 1942, his remains were reburied at VMI.

In 1876, a campaign to put a station in Albemarle County along the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad track (once the Blue Ridge Railroad's line) resulted in the founding of the town named for the French-born engineer, Claudius Crozet.

- Duncan Adams