On a raw September morning in 1847, on the east bank of the Ohio River at Wheeling, Virginia, a thirty-seven-year-old engineer named Charles Ellet Jr. stood watching a six-hundred-foot iron rope being pulled across the current on a flatboat. For fifteen years he had been telling anyone who would listen that a suspension bridge of unprecedented length could be built over the Ohio at this very spot, and for fifteen years he had been ignored. Now, watching the first cable inch its way across the brown, fast-running water, he believed, for the first time, that it was actually going to happen.
The river at Wheeling is nine hundred feet wide at the narrowest crossing. In the 1840s it ran unbroken by any bridge from Pittsburgh all the way south to Cincinnati. It stopped everything that could not float. Steamboats steamed around it.
Freight wagons forded it at low water and paid ferry fees at high water. A railroad that Virginia desperately wanted to push west into the Ohio Valley had no way across without a structure no one in America had ever built. Ellet had proposed the solution as early as 1839, writing a formal engineering pamphlet describing how a single-span wire suspension bridge could be thrown across the Ohio at Wheeling, with a main span of more than a thousand feet. They ignored the pamphlet.
He proposed the same solution to another group of investors in 1841, and they ignored him too. Then he proposed it a third time in 1845, and this time the Wheeling and Belmont Bridge Company responded, because by then it was no longer a theoretical question. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad needed a crossing at Wheeling to complete its line west, and the crossing it needed was the same one Ellet had been describing for six years. The engineering records are preserved, along with the Ohio River survey logs of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, contemporary reports in the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, and the surviving correspondence between Ellet and the bridge company.
What they show is how a state with almost no tradition of long-span bridge building managed to construct the longest suspension bridge in the world over a major American river in under three years, using prefabricated wire ropes, hand-cut stone, and the labor of men who crossed the same river every morning at low water to reach their jobs. The Ohio at Wheeling is not a narrow river. The main channel is nine hundred feet wide at the crossing point. The riverbed is silt over bedrock, which looks stable at first glance, until you realize that the Ohio rises twenty feet in a spring flood and runs at six miles per hour at high water.
The ferries built at Wheeling in the 1830s and 1840s worked efficiently at low water, but they failed completely when the river rose. The economic pressure to build a bridge was not theoretical. In 1847, the year construction began, Wheeling was the second-largest city in Virginia and the westernmost railroad terminus on the Baltimore and Ohio line. All freight moving west by rail stopped at Wheeling, crossed the river by ferry, and then continued overland or by river into the Ohio Valley.
The delay at the Wheeling crossing cost the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad a great deal of money every day. That pressure is what finally won Ellet the contract. Two men supervised opposite ends of the project. Charles Ellet Jr.
was born in 1810 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the son of a farmer. There was no formal engineering education available in the United States in the 1820s. All he had was a French engineering book he read as a boy and an ambition so intense it worried the people around him. At seventeen he wrote a letter to the United States Army Corps of Engineers asking to be trained as an engineer, and the Corps refused.
So he did what no American engineer of his generation had done. In 1830, at age twenty, he sailed to France and enrolled at the École Polytechnique in Paris, then the finest engineering school in the world. He spent two years there studying under faculty who had trained the men who built the great stone bridges of the French canal system. He returned to the United States in 1832 with a French engineering degree, French terms for stress analysis and load distribution, and complete impatience with the conservative American engineering establishment, which was still building covered wooden bridges over every river less than two hundred feet wide.
The second man is harder to place, because far less information survives about him. His name was Charles K. Danforth, and he was the master mason who supervised the crews that built the two bridge towers of the Wheeling bridge from the riverbank up to their full height of 153 feet above the water. Danforth was a skilled mason from the Pennsylvania tradition, trained building canal locks along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in the 1830s.
He had cut and placed stone in water before, the exact skill the Wheeling towers required. The towers had to be founded on the riverbanks close enough to the water to anchor the wire cables at the correct angle, which meant building in a zone the Ohio flooded every spring and that stayed permanently damp. Danforth’s crews worked on the tower foundations through 1846 and 1847, quarrying limestone from a quarry eight miles from the river, hauling it by wagon to the bank, and laying it in courses with mortar mixed on site. The two towers rose at the same time, one on the Wheeling side in Virginia and the other on Zane’s Island in the river, and they had to reach exactly the same height, or the cable angles across the span would be wrong when the wiring was installed.
The basic engineering unit of a wire suspension bridge is the cable. The cable is what distinguished Ellet’s bridges from every long bridge built before in America. A suspension bridge hangs its roadway from vertical suspension rods that hang from two main cables. The cables run from a buried anchorage on one bank, up over the tower on that side, across the main span in a long curve, over the far tower, and down to a buried anchorage on the other bank.
The weight of the roadway and traffic pulls the cables downward, which pulls the towers inward, which transfers that force through the masonry into the foundation. The anchorages on both ends resist the horizontal pull, holding the entire system together. A suspension bridge could be built with iron chains, as the British had been doing since the early nineteenth century. The problem with a chain is that each link is a potential weak point, and the system is heavy for its length.
A wire rope, which is bundles of thin iron wires twisted into strands, and multiple strands twisted into a cable, was stronger per unit of weight than a chain. A wire-cable suspension bridge could span a longer distance and carry more load with less material than an equivalent chain bridge. Ellet had learned this in France, and he had been arguing it to American investors for fifteen years. Wheeling was the first place they let him prove it.
The wire rope for the Wheeling bridge was manufactured in the iron wire mills of the Pittsburgh area, about sixty miles up the Ohio. Each of the four main cables was about seven inches in diameter, made up of several strands of iron wire twisted together to reach the final thickness. The finished wire rope was shipped down the river to Wheeling by flatboat, in coiled sections that the rigging crews could handle on the bank. The first transfer of a cable across the Ohio at Wheeling was the most dangerous operation of the entire construction.
It was the step that could not be undone if something went wrong. Ellet deliberately chose to begin the crossing in the autumn of 1847, because the low river ran slow. The rigging crew loaded the leading end of the first cable section onto a flatboat and paid it out across the current while crews on the opposite bank pulled the ropes. The cable weighed several tons per section.
The flatboat sat low in the water with the weight of the cable dragging behind it against the current. The men on the Zane’s Island side hauled on their ropes. The flatboat crew pulled hard. The cable swung with the current in a long arc, and the men on the island wharf pulled it up onto the temporary rigging platform at the base of the unfinished tower.
The process was repeated as each section of cable was added, adjusted, and finally secured, and it took most of the winter and spring of 1847 and 1848. The men who moved that cable were not trained in suspension bridge rigging. There were almost no trained suspension bridge riggers in the United States in 1847, because so few suspension bridges had been built there. The men Ellet hired to install the wiring came from steamboat experience, men who understood the concepts of load and tension from practical experience on the Ohio itself.
They knew what happened when a rope snapped under load, and they knew how to take up a moving rope without getting their hands caught in it. They applied that knowledge to a structure none of them had ever built, following the instructions of an engineer who had studied the theory in France fifteen years earlier. The towers were built at the same time the wire was being manufactured and rigged. Danforth’s masonry crews worked through 1846 and 1847, laying courses of limestone for both towers from the waterline upward.
The towers were massive, twelve feet thick at the base, tapering as they rose, faced with cut limestone over a rubble core. At 153 feet above the water, each tower carried a cast-iron saddle where the wire cable changed direction from the near-vertical slope of the side span to the long, shallow curve of the main span. The saddles were cast in an iron foundry in Pittsburgh and shipped down the river. Lifting a heavy iron saddle 153 feet up a stone tower using only pulleys and hoists powered by horses was the challenge facing Danforth.
He solved it by rigging a temporary crane from the top of each tower when it reached its final height, using the tower itself as the base for the lifting equipment. The roadway of the swinging bridge hung from the main cables on vertical iron rods. The deck was a wooden roadway laid on wooden trusses wide enough for two wagon tracks with a narrow space between them. The whole deck system was light by later standards.
Ellet designed it for the traffic of 1848: horse-drawn wagons, pedestrians, and the occasional herd of cattle. He had not fully accounted for the effect of continuous strong wind on a flat, flexible deck a thousand feet long suspended in open air above a river valley. The payroll records of the Wheeling and Belmont Bridge Company, held in the West Virginia State Archives, show that the number of construction workers at the peak of the work ranged from eighty to one hundred twenty men. Most of the laborers were Irish immigrants who had come to Wheeling via the Ohio River from canal projects to the east.
An ordinary laborer earned between ninety cents and one dollar twenty-five cents per day, paid monthly in cash. A skilled stonecutter working on the tower face earned between one dollar seventy-five cents and two dollars per day, because that face required the ability to set joints accurately at heights, not just swing a hammer. Of the eighty to one hundred twenty men at peak, about forty names can be matched between the payroll, the Wheeling city directory, and the census records of the period. Of those forty, thirty-one were born in Ireland, three in Germany, two in England, and four in Virginia or Pennsylvania.
Many of the men who laid the foundations of the Wheeling bridge had also worked on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. A workday on the Wheeling towers in the summer of 1847 is worth imagining. The stonecutters reached the quarry before the wagons left. The quarry crew used hand drills and iron wedges to split limestone blocks from the rock formation, blocks weighing between two hundred and eight hundred pounds depending on their position in the ledge.
Wagon crews hauled the blocks to the riverbank along a road that the wagon wheels turned to mud within three weeks of the start of the project. On the bank the blocks were unloaded with a wooden crane and pulley. Then they were carried up the scaffolding by a rotation of laborers on the scaffold platforms, each man carrying the block for three steps of the ladder before passing it to the man above him. The masons set each block in mortar using vertical lines dropped from fixed points on the masonry.
A skilled mason at this kind of work set between twelve and eighteen large blocks per day. The tower rose from a foot and a half to two feet per day during the summer months when the mortar dried quickly. By September of 1847, the Wheeling-side tower was only twenty feet short of its final height. The men on the top scaffold could see the whole city of Wheeling below them to the east, and the wide bend of the Ohio to the north and south.
The wind off the river at that height blew constantly from the west. A fall from the top scaffold would have been a fall of 130 feet. The payroll records show two deaths and four serious injuries between the spring of 1846 and the autumn of 1849. The records list the dates of the injuries and the amounts paid to the injured men for lost time.
In two of the four injury cases, no name was recorded. In both deaths, no name was recorded at all. The record gives the date, the note, and the number. Men died building the Wheeling bridge, and the company did not always record their names.
Construction finished in the autumn of 1849. The bridge opened to its first public crossing on November 16 of that year. The main span was exactly 1,010 feet long. The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer described it as longer than any bridge in America, longer than any suspension bridge in Europe, and the longest free span of any kind in the world.
The New York Tribune picked up the story, and papers in Boston followed. Charles Ellet Jr. walked across the bridge on opening day and gave a speech that the paper described as deeply moving. He had spent fifteen years proposing the bridge and three years building it.
He was thirty-nine years old. He had just built the longest bridge in the world. The Wheeling bridge was not just an engineering achievement. It immediately became a political problem.
Within a year of its opening, Pennsylvania steamboat companies filed suit in federal court arguing that it was a public nuisance. Their argument was specific and technically accurate. The main cables of the Wheeling bridge ran about ninety-three feet above the surface of the Ohio at mid-span. The tall, double-stacked steamboats used in the Ohio River trade, whose twin chimneys rose forty and fifty feet above the pilot house, could not pass underneath with their stacks upright.
To pass under the Wheeling bridge, a captain either had to wait for low water or fold his steamboat’s chimneys down before entering the bridge. The case, Pennsylvania v. the Wheeling and Belmont Bridge Company, reached the Supreme Court of the United States, and the decision was handed down on February 6, 1852. The Court ruled five to four that the bridge was a legal obstruction to navigation on the Ohio River, and that it must either be raised or removed.
Ellet responded by pressuring Congress directly. The Virginia delegation introduced legislation declaring the Wheeling bridge a legal post road, which would give it federal protection as part of the national mail route. Congress passed the Wheeling Bridge Act in August 1852. It was the first time in American history that Congress used legislation to overturn a Supreme Court decision about a specific piece of infrastructure.
The steamboat companies challenged the act before the Supreme Court a second time. In 1856 the Court upheld the constitutionality of the act, and the bridge stayed. By the time of that second ruling, the bridge had already collapsed and been rebuilt. The collapse came on the night of May 17, 1854, when a severe thunderstorm with high winds swept through the Ohio Valley.
The wind struck the main span at a right angle, and the deck began to move, not in a simple sway but in a twisting, undulating wave that ran along the length of the bridge and grew with each cycle. The suspension ropes on the windward side went slack as the deck rose, while the leeward suspension ropes tightened sharply as it fell. The wave grew stronger until it exceeded what the bridge structure could bear. The cables and towers survived.
The deck and its suspension rods fell into the Ohio River in pieces. What happened to the Wheeling bridge on May 17, 1854, repeated with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State eighty-six years later, in 1940. The engineers who investigated that collapse gave the phenomenon a name: aerodynamic flutter. The deck was not responding to the wind as a static load, but as a dynamic excitation.
The wind transferred energy into the oscillating deck faster than the bridge’s self-damping could dissipate it, until the oscillation grew and destroyed it. Engineers in 1854 did not have that terminology. They worked from their observations of the Wheeling collapse, and from earlier collapses of chain suspension bridges in Britain and France, which showed that long, light, flexible bridge decks failed in wind, while heavier, stiffer decks did not. The Wheeling and Belmont Bridge Company rebuilt the bridge in 1854 and 1855 under the supervision of engineer Wilhelm Hildenbrand, who was brought to Wheeling specifically to fix the structural flaw.
Hildenbrand’s solution was to stiffen the deck. He added diagonal cables running from the towers down to the deck at regular intervals along the main span, supplementing the original vertical cables. He added a wooden truss along the outer edge of the deck, on both sides, running the full length of the span to resist the twisting motion that had destroyed the original deck. He increased the weight of the deck planks, and added lateral braces between the outer trusses and the main cables.
The rebuilt bridge was heavier, stiffer, and more aerodynamically stable than the bridge Ellet had originally built. It was reopened to traffic in 1856. John Roebling studied what Hildenbrand had done at Wheeling and incorporated the same principles into the design of the Brooklyn Bridge, which Roebling began in 1867 and his son Washington completed in 1883. The stiffening truss on the Brooklyn Bridge deck is a direct descendant of what Hildenbrand added to the Wheeling deck in 1855.
The most famous suspension bridge in American history grew directly out of the engineering lessons learned from the Wheeling collapse. Charles Ellet Jr. did not live to see Hildenbrand’s rebuilt bridge, or the second Supreme Court decision, or the Brooklyn Bridge. After Wheeling, he built a temporary wire footbridge across the Niagara Gorge, 825 feet long, completed in 1848.
He spent years in a dispute with John Roebling over the contract for the permanent Niagara railway bridge, lost it to Roebling, and moved on to flood-control work on the Mississippi River and to designing steam ram ships for the United States Navy. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Charles Jr. commissioned a fleet of steam ram gunboats at his own expense and offered them to the Union. At the Battle of Memphis on June 6, 1862, his rams broke through the Confederate river defense fleet on the Mississippi and opened the river north of Memphis to the Union.
During the battle, Charles Jr. was shot in the knee on the deck of his flagship, the Queen of the West. He died of his wound seventeen days later in Cairo, Illinois. He was fifty-two years old.
The payroll records of the men who laid the stone of his bridge and pulled his wires across the Ohio read as follows. A laborer named T. Moran worked eighty-seven days in 1847 and was paid $82. 65 in total, or ninety-five cents per day.
A stonecutter named J. Murphy worked one hundred twelve days in the same year and was paid $196, or one dollar seventy-five cents per day. The records do not show their ages, or their places of birth, or what happened to them after the bridge was finished. Most moved on to other construction projects on the Ohio River system, and their names vanish from later records.
The Wheeling bridge still stands. It carries automobile traffic across the Ohio at Wheeling, West Virginia, today, over the same wire cables that Ellet’s men dragged across the river in the autumn of 1847. The cables have been reinforced and wrapped over the years, and the deck has been rebuilt more than once. But the towers are still the original stone, the same limestone Danforth’s crews hauled from the quarry eight miles away and laid course by course in 1846 and 1847.
The stone has changed color where the river touched it in flood years, and the mortar joints have been re-pointed many times, but the stone itself has not moved. The Wheeling Suspension Bridge is the oldest wire suspension bridge in the United States, and it is still in use. It has carried traffic across the Ohio for 175 years. The men who built it were paid between ninety cents and two dollars a day, and moved on to the next job when this one was done.
The payroll that tells us most of what we know about them is in the West Virginia State Archives in Charleston, along with Ellet’s engineering correspondence and the original issue of the bridge bonds. When you cross a long bridge today and feel the structure move under you, remember that the men who first crossed the Wheeling bridge on November 16, 1849, felt that movement, and came back and crossed it again the next day. The men who rebuilt it in 1855 knew it had already collapsed once, and climbed back up onto the cables anyway.
The names in that payroll record deserve to be read aloud.
