This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
They called it the miracle bridge as it slowly arched across the St. Louis waterfront toward Illinois from 1867 to 1874—a web of steel girders and trusses looking much like the largest erector set a boy could ever imagine. A miracle because of its size—a 520-foot central span—and because the massive granite piers supporting the arches had to go down seventy feet through quicksand to a safe foundation.
The Eads Bridge, as it came to be known, is still one of the finest steel arch bridges in the United States. It was designed and built by the kid from LeClaire, Iowa, who cleared the mouth of the Mississippi River.
James B. Eads was growing up in LeClaire at the head of the Rock Island Rapids in the 1830s when the government was making its first attempts to make the Mississippi safe for steamboat navigation. This river improvement work was done by military engineers trained at West Point. There were few civil engineers and no place to train them.
Which didn't stop Eads. Tinkering with the river must have gotten in his blood. Eads became a civil engineer by studying at an unaccredited school—the Mississippi River. Before tackling the St. Louis bridge, he had already retired from a career in salvaging sunken steamboats and had built iron clad Mississippi warships for the Union in 1861.
Year after year, the spidery girders reached out toward each other from the piers. Four years, five years, then six. Then as the great central arches neared each other, hot weather expanded the steel work so that the connecting parts could not be made to fit. No textbooks for this problem. Midwest heat foiled the best engineering skill in the world.
But not for long, not for a LeClaire boy who had learned to make do. Eads simply packed the steel parts in gunny sacks filled with ice until they shrank enough to be fitted in place, and the great bridge was done.
In 1885, the British Society for the Encouragement of Art, Manufacture, & Commerce awarded James B. Eads the Albert Medal—the first American so honored. Eads was pleased with the award, but I'll bet the LeClaire boy inside him was even more pleased by the ice trick.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
