Walter Mickle Smith, Sr. (October 26, 1867 - March 12, 1953) was a civil engineer who worked primarily on U.S. dams and waterway projects.
He received bachelor of science and civil engineering degrees from the Military College of South Carolina.
[1] In 1891 he joined the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, working from 1891 to 1897 on coastal fortifications and jetty construction in Charleston, South Carolina.
[1] In 1919, Smith was hired by his long-time colleague Mortimer Grant Barnes as chief design engineer for the Illinois Waterway Project, a system that includes eight locks providing a shipping connection from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River.
[1][4][8] Smith was placed "in charge of design and preparation of plans for locks, dams and structures" pertaining to the Illinois Waterway.
In its Second Annual Report in 1919, the Department of Waterways noted that its plans for locks were based on Smith's "least work" methodology: The wall designs adopted for the Illinois Waterway have been checked by these methods, but the designs are based on the 'least work' method for the analysis of arched structures as described by articles by Walter M. Smith .
[20] In 1889, Smith married Nettie Babcock McDonald, a fellow South Carolina native born in September 1866.