Francis Tunica

Francis Tunica was an engineer and architect from Brunswick, Germany, who came to the United States in 1848 and settled in St. Louis. During the Civil War he served from 1862 to 1864 as a surveyor and engineer with the Union Army’s Engineer Regiment of the West, mapping ground and building bridges and roads for the campaigns around Vicksburg. Afterward he won the city’s competition for the iron perimeter fence and gates of Lafayette Park, completed in 1869, and the commissioners of Tower Grove Park hired him to supervise construction of the park’s early buildings, among them the superintendent’s house, the stables, and the gate lodges. He later practiced in Omaha, designing park structures and residences there, and moved to San Francisco to work for the North Pacific and San Francisco Railroad. He died in San Francisco in 1891.