A SWEEP OF BRIDGES
“De railroad bridges’s A sad song in de air…”
A photographic essay by David Flowden
In 1801 James Finley, a justice of the peace in Pennsylvania, connected towers on both sides of a creek with cables, hung a platform between them, and thereby invented the modern suspension bridge. It seems more than coincidence that this vital structural form had its genesis in Yankee ingenuity, for America, more than any other country, benefited from the engineering conquest of its natural barriers. During the half century after our Revolution men came to realize both how incredibly rich in resources their new-won country was and how worthless these resources were without the means to move about freely. Settlers moving west had to cross the rivers they came to only once. But for these settlers to prosper, their produce had to have sturdy and permanent access to the centers of civilization. So they built bridges. Their works carried water for the early canals and, later, the rails for the trains that were to bind a patchwork of scattered provinces into a unified nation. In Europe bridges were built to serve existing societies; in America they helped to create the society. Many have been torn down, including the graceful 1897 suspension bridge at East Liverpool, Ohio, shown on these pages. Nevertheless, a good number have survived, and photographer David Plowden has devoted several years to finding and photographing them for his book Bridges: The Spans of North America, to be published by Viking early next year. We are proud to present the following portfolio of his evocative pictures of the gaunt and wistful structures on whose weathered surfaces can be read so much of our history.
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YANKEE MASONRY
The hugely successful Erie Canal was considered one of the great works of its age, but today few of its handsome masonry aqueducts remain. Of these the most impressive is the Schoharie Creek Aqueduct at Fort Hunter, New York, which is shown above. Opened in 1845, it carried barges over a dangerous slack-water crossing that had long hampered traffic on the canal. It has not been properly preserved, and today only nine of its fourteen arches remain. The magnificent Starrucca Viaduct at Lanesboro, Pennsylvania, opposite, has fared much better; this 1,040-foot-long bridge, built by the Erie Railroad to carry the lightweight trains of 1851, is still in use and has no trouble supporting the weight of modern freight drags.
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EXPERIMENTS IN TIMBER
Stone bridges were strongest, but America, with its scant investment capital and lack of time, was frequently forced to turn to its timber supplies. Flimsy trestles were thrown up in weeks to help the railroads push west. Most of them have long since been replaced, but the one at left, built by the Great Northern Railroad at Hanover, Montana, in 1930, still carries freight. In contrast to its crude complexity, the engaging little shed above enjoys the distinction of being the shortest covered railroad bridge in the world. Built around the turn of the century by the St. Johnsbury & Lamoille County Railroad at Wolcott, Vermont, the ninety-foot span did yeoman service until the line was recently abandoned. The bridge, however, still survives. |
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IRON INTRICACIES
Wrought iron is infinitely more durable than wood, and once American foundries became sophisticated enough to handle such work, dozens of iron-bridge companies sprang into existence. The proud speciality of the Berlin Iron Bridge Company was its patented Parabolic Truss. Increasing use of steel in bridges had already rendered the truss obsolete when the patent was granted in 1878, but vigorous salesmen kept flogging it with considerable success well into the nineties. The arresting form can be seen below in an 1893 bridge at Norfolk, New York, and opposite in the splendid five-span vehicular bridge of 1885 that is still in use over the Merrimack River at Lowell, Massachusetts.
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TWENTIETH - CENTURY STEEL
By the turn of the century it had become obvious that wrought iron lacked the strength to support the increasing weight of rail traffic, and engineers brought about an era of superlative steel bridges. Regarded as ugly and ponderous by the architectural critics of the time, the bridges have survived their detractors and are today justly seen as works of utilitarian grandeur. The two shown here were designed by the greatest engineers of the era, Gustav Lindenthal and Ralph Modjeski. Linden that’s massive Sciotoville Bridge over the Ohio River, below, was completed in 1917. Modjeski’s 1930 Mid-Hudson Bridge at Poughkeepsie, New York, at right, is considered to be one of the most beautiful suspension bridges in the world.
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“ONE OF THE TRUE WONDERS OF THE WORLD”
Engineers occasionally tried to modify what they saw to be the stark ugliness of naked steel beams. The most notable of these attempts is the railroad bridge across the Cape Cod Canal at Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. The famous architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White was called in and designed two towers capped by steel abstractions meant to represent lighthouses. The bridge, finished in 1935, is shown at the left, with the main span raised to permit shipping to pass underneath. The first American concrete bridge, a humble twenty-foot span in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, was built in 1871. By the turn of the century this new material was capturing the interest of engineers, and in 1915 novelist Theodore Dreiser enthused: “It is rather odd to stand in the presence of so great a thing in the making and realize that you are looking at one of the true wonders of the world.” He was referring to the majestic Tunkhannock Viaduct, the huge concrete bridge shown below. Mainstay of a twelve-million-dollar thirty-nine-mile cutoff on the Lackawanna Railroad, the 2,375-foot Tunkhannock carries its railway line 240 feet above the valley it spans. It is still the biggest and most impressive concrete bridge in North America. |
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