Sylvanus Thayer came to Washington in 1793 at age eight to live with his uncle Azariah Faxon, attended school there, and worked in his uncle's store to earn money for an engineering education. In 1802, at 17, he taught in the same school before entering Dartmouth College in 1803. He left during his senior year in March 1807 after President Thomas Jefferson appointed him a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, and in February 1808 he was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers as the academy's 33rd graduate. In 1815 Major Thayer was sent to Europe by the War Department under President James Madison to study military education and military engineering and to collect 1,000 books on those subjects. In 1817 President James Monroe appointed him the fifth superintendent of West Point, and during the next 16 years he established the Honor System, the Academic Board, the Board of Visitors, and other programs, regulations, and codes that characterize the academy before leaving as superintendent in 1833. He continued in military engineering, became Commanding Officer of the U.S. Corps of Engineers in 1857, retired as a brigadier general on June 1, 1863, and in 1871 provided funds to establish Thayer Public Library and Thayer Academy in Braintree, Massachusetts, and the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. He died in Braintree, Massachusetts, on September 7, 1872, at age 87.