Edwin Bryant Crocker

Class of 1833
Western Railroad Pioneer
1818-1875

Edwin Crocker, a lawyer who relocated to Sacramento from the Midwest and was named associate justice of the California State Supreme Court in 1863, became the legal counsel for the Central Pacific Railroad Co.

Responsibility for the railroad called upon his engineering education, legal experience, political connections, and charming diplomacy.

When his brother, Charles — one of the "Big Four" who built the western portion of the transcontinental railroad — resigned, Crocker became a director, and by the 1870s was one of the railroad's largest investors.

Earlier in his career, Crocker had been an anti-slavery advocate; later in life he built an art collection that became Sacramento's Crocker Art Museum.