The son of U.S. Army General Montgomery C. Meigs, he was born in Detroit, Michigan, and educated at Harvard University and in Germany.
[2] Although Meigs had not served in the military, he was often referred to as "Major" out of courtesy, because his predecessor at the Des Moines Rapids had been an army officer.
Whitney to tell the Saturday Evening Post in 1924 that he could not recall a single incident having occurred by any vessel passing through the locks, so long as the rules had been obeyed,[4] and that Meigs did not hesitate to become involved personally if needs be.
One of his six daughters, author Cornelia Meigs, wrote in the Keokuk Daily Gate newspaper, dated July 30, 1966:[3] "...It is an unrecorded part of my father’s work that he had the whole picture of the river channel so fully in his mind, with his almost day to day information as to what the mighty Mississippi was about that he felt himself able, where other men would be in doubt, to take the wheel of the big passenger and cargo boats, carrying several hundred people, and pilot them himself down through some treacherous reach of the channel, often rising from his bed at night to do so.
He invented a "canvas coffer-dam," and pioneered the application of crude oil to dirt roads to improve driving conditions by controlling dust and mud.