George Earl Church

Colonel George Earl Church (December 7, 1835 – January 4, 1910), was an American civil engineer and geographer, famous as an explorer of South America.

In 1857 he was appointed Chief Engineer for the Argentine Great Northern Railway, based in Buenos Aires surveying a route for the government of Argentina.

After delays occurred due to financial restrictions, Church joined a seven-month exploration of southern Argentina that covered 7,000 miles (11,000 km).

[3] Having written on issues associated with Mexico, the United States Government had Church appointed as war correspondent of the New York Herald in 1866.

At this point, he spoke fluent Spanish, Portuguese and French, and was familiar with many Amerindian languages of Mexico, and Central and South America.

[3] In 1869, Church was appointed by the Government of Bolivia to find a way to explore a navigation enterprise that linked the Mamoré and Madeira Rivers, to extract raw materials from the Amazon jungle.

However, on realizing the difficulty of this undertaking from the Pacific Ocean side of the mountains, in 1870 he gained a concession from the Government of Brazil to explore the construction of a railway to connect the border states of Rondônia and Acre to the navigable Amazon River at Porto Velho.

Thought lost to the Brazilian rainforest, the locomotive was rediscovered decades later and refurbished; it now sits on static display at the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad Museum in Porto Velho.