In the summer of 1852, a bricklayer worked at the bottom of the Appomattox River valley below Farmville, Virginia, laying the lower courses of a stone pier that had already risen thirty feet above the valley floor. It still had to rise more than ninety feet higher before it reached the elevation where the wooden bridge spans of the South Side Railroad would rest upon it. The valley around him was the one the Appomattox River had carved through the Virginia Piedmont over geological ages. The river ran in a narrow bottom between walls that rose steeply on both sides toward the high ground above.

The walls were covered with the mixed hardwood forests that distinguished the interior of Virginia. The air at the valley floor was cold in the early morning, trapped against the clay walls by the midday sun, so that heat and humidity built up together until the workday ended and the river lowered the temperature once more. The pier he was building would be one of twenty-one set across the valley floor from the south bank to the north. The tallest would reach 125 feet above the river’s surface.

The wooden bridge that would rest on them once complete would carry the South Side Railroad across an obstacle not of width but of depth: the gorge the Appomattox had cut below the grade the railroad had to maintain if the crossing was to function as a railroad passage, not a descent into the valley and a climb out on every trip. The Appomattox at Farmville was not a difficult river to cross at its channel itself. The channel at the crossing point was moderate in width and depth, passable in dry season, and a bridge of modest span could be thrown over it in any season. What made the Appomattox at the high bridge one of the most important engineering challenges on the entire South Side Railroad was not the river.

It was the valley. Below the surface of the surrounding Piedmont plateau, the Appomattox at this location ran in the bottom of a chasm that put the river’s surface roughly 125 feet below the high ground on both sides, enclosed by walls so steep that any train attempting to reach the crossing at the required grade from either approach would have had to cut a mile descending to the river and a mile climbing away from it, adding two hundred feet of elevation change to every train movement across the Appomattox for the entire operating life of the line. The South Side Railroad was 123 miles long. Every grade obstacle along its route affected the economics of the freight and passenger traffic the railroad was built to serve.

Any crossing that imposed such a rise and fall on every train using it would reduce the railroad’s operational capacity across that section in ways no later improvement in equipment or track could repair, because the inefficiency was in the geography itself. The engineers of the South Side Railroad surveyed the levels across the Appomattox valley at Farmville, and those levels told them what the crossing required. It required height. The South Side Railroad had been chartered by the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1846.

Its route ran from Petersburg, the second largest city in Virginia and the commercial gateway for the tobacco counties of the south side, west to Lynchburg, Virginia’s interior market where goods from the Richmond commercial system connected with valley traffic headed south and west. The 123 miles of South Side track crossed terrain that was acceptable by the standards of the Virginia plateau, until it reached the Appomattox valley at Farmville. The Appomattox at that location was not manageable the way the rest of the route had been. It was the one place on the entire line where the plateau ended, where the grade and alignment the engineers had been able to maintain across the Piedmont plateau dropped into a river system that would have broken the grade had there not been a structure of extraordinary scale.

It was not an obstacle that could be avoided, and it was not an obstacle that could be crossed low. The South Side Railroad was not among the largest railroads in Virginia. The Virginia Central and the Richmond and Danville were larger and better capitalized. But for the counties between Petersburg and Lynchburg, the South Side was the essential railroad: the only link the tobacco, grain, and livestock economy of those counties possessed to reach the markets and ports on which they depended.

The crossing at High Bridge was the single most important engineering commitment the South Side Railroad made during the construction of its line, and the engineering department had known from the survey stage what would be required of them there. The question facing the South Side’s engineering department in the late 1840s, when the route surveys were complete and the alignment fixed, was not whether the Appomattox should be crossed at great height. The alignment had already settled that. The real question was what material the crossing would be built from.

Timber construction was faster and cheaper in initial capital than any stone alternative, and required no quarries or kilns near the site. Wood had been the dominant material in American railroad bridge building through the 1830s and 1840s, and the bridge carpenters and timber framing systems developed over those decades were available and understood. The objections to timber at the scale of High Bridge were the same ones that applied to timber at any major railroad crossing. Wood rotted under the stress of loads and weather, and required rebuilding at intervals.

The railroad’s operating budget would have to absorb that for the entire operating life of the line. At the height of the high bridge piers, replacing a decayed timber span meant working at elevations that increased the cost and difficulty of every construction operation, making the financial saving of timber over masonry secondary. The initial cost mattered less the higher the structure rose above the ground. Iron was available, and iron could carry the loads.

But the American iron-forming industry in 1848 and 1849 was concentrated in the northeastern states, and the cost and time of obtaining manufactured iron components for a construction site in rural southern Virginia was a constraint the South Side Railroad’s finances could not easily bear at the pace its construction schedule demanded. What the Virginia Piedmont possessed in abundance was clay. And what clay, properly burned in kilns erected near the construction site, became was brick. And what brick, well bonded with hydraulic mortar and proportioned for the compressive loads the structure would impose on it over an operating life beyond any practical planning horizon, could achieve was what the Thomas Viaduct had been doing at Relay since 1835, and what the tradition of Roman-era stone arches had proven in aqueducts and bridges still standing at their places of construction for two thousand years.

The High Bridge piers were to be of brick construction. The superstructure above them would be of the Howe truss type in wood, adjustable in service and replaceable at the end of its useful life, resting on piers of masonry that the South Side Railroad intended to build once. The brick for the piers was burned from clay deposits along the Appomattox valley in kilns erected near the construction site. Kiln burning on site was the standard solution for large construction projects far from brick suppliers, and the clay deposits of the Virginia Piedmont were accessible to the site to support the kiln output the pier construction program demanded.

The kilns produced brick in the quantities the construction schedule required, and the brick was moved from the kiln yards to the work sites at the base of each pier by wagon and by hand across the valley floor. The geometry of the pier tapered from a massive cross-section at the base, wide enough to distribute the concentrated loads of the iron bridge above across a foundation area the valley floor geology could support without uneven settlement, to a narrower section at the top where the timber spans rested on the masonry. This taper served two structural purposes. It reduced the dead weight the pier itself imposed on its foundation as it rose.

It maintained the structural capacity to carry the live loads of trains above by keeping the compressive stress on the masonry within the required range. The combination of brick and mortar could withstand the repeated loading cycles over an operating life the designers planned in decades rather than years. The bonding pattern, the arrangement of courses tying the face brick to the backing courses and distributing compressive load across the full cross-section of the pier, was the decisive quality variable in this kind of construction at this height. A properly bonded pier was a homogeneous compression member, its mortar joints structurally invisible because every joint was fully loaded in compression and the entire cross-section acted as a single unit.

A pier bonded with voids in the interior backing courses or weak joint filling at the faces showed signs of deterioration over time, as the railroad’s loading cycles found any bonding failure gaps and worked them open. The bricklayers at High Bridge did this work under the supervision of foremen whose judgment of quality was the standard by which the piers would serve the railroad as long as they stood. As the piers rose above the first scaffolding, working conditions changed in the specific way they change when the work surface rises above the fixed features of the surrounding landscape. Below forty feet, the bricklayer had the valley walls and the hardwood canopy as spatial reference, and the valley floor was close enough that the body adapted to the height as a daily working condition.

Above sixty feet, the treetops dropped below the work scaffolding at the highest pier positions. Above eighty feet, the valley walls on both sides were below the scaffolding. Above one hundred feet, the working platform was above the fixed terrain of the valley floor, and the bricklayer laying mortar and leveling brick on the line worked in the open air of a Virginia summer, with the river one hundred feet below the platform edge and nothing between him and the full distance but the scaffolding planks he stood on and whatever wooden railing the construction company had placed at the platform edge. The loads moving through the temporary structures up to the working level, the brick platforms and mortar troughs swinging on ropes and the wooden hoisting equipment, were the hazards the men receiving and directing them knew the way they knew the characteristics of the tools they used every day.

The construction company’s accounts record the progress of the work on the piers. They do not record the conditions as they were faced by the men who worked in them. The workforce that built High Bridge occupied a different place in the labor economy of the Virginia Piedmont than the workforce that built the Rockville Bridge in the Susquehanna valley fifty years later. At Rockville in 1900, the heavy construction workforce consisted of men from southern Italy and Sicily, organized through the padrone system, an intermediary contractor standing between the worker and the wage who took his share before the remainder reached the worker.

At High Bridge in 1852, the prevailing form of construction labor in the Virginia Piedmont was not the immigrant worker organized through a contractor who collected the wage and paid out a remainder. It was the enslaved worker hired out through the hiring-out system that Virginia’s plantation economy had developed over preceding generations as a mechanism for placing forced labor into the wage labor markets that railroad, canal, and quarry construction operations required. The hiring-out system worked as follows. A Virginia farmer who owned enslaved laborers with skills or physical capacity beyond what his agricultural operations required in a given season could hire those workers out to a construction company or a railroad.

The construction company negotiated the wage rate with the farmer. The farmer received the wages. The worker received no money, because the legal structure of Virginia in 1852 did not permit an enslaved person to hold wages. What the worker received was the continuation of living conditions described in the hiring contract in terms broad enough to give the construction company the operational flexibility it needed, and specific enough to give the farmer the assurance that the person he owned would return at the end of the hiring period in a condition that allowed him to be worked again.

The hiring contract bound the construction company to the farmer. The enslaved worker was the subject of the contract, not a party to it. The South Side Railroad’s hiring books survive partially in the Virginia archives. The farmers appear in those books by name, with the number of workers they supplied, and with the monthly rate the railroad paid.

The individual workers supplied by those owners appear in the books at the level the hiring economy required for financial tracking: a total count at the applicable monthly rate. Some individual names appear in the records at the level required by the owner’s own farm accounts to track his workers as productive assets. In most cases, the aggregate count is what the financial record preserved. The men who mixed mortar on the floor of the Appomattox valley in the summer of 1852, carried it up the scaffolding to the working level, set each brick in its bed of mortar, checked the courses for line, and moved on to the next course appear in the South Side Railroad’s construction accounts as a labor cost at the rates set by the hiring contracts.

They appear as a cost. They appear as a line in a ledger prepared to track payments to the farmers who supplied them. They rarely appear as men. The Irish laborers who worked on the High Bridge construction alongside the hired workforce held legal status as free men.

In one sense, the hired workers did not, and they were paid in cash and directly rather than having someone else collect for their labor. The practical gap between the economic circumstances of a free Irish laborer at a railroad construction site in rural Virginia in 1852 and those of an enslaved hired laborer at the same site was real and significant in the dimension of how each group appeared in the surviving construction records. That distance was smaller. The Irish laborer, whose job level fell below the level of foreman, appears in the South Side Railroad’s payroll records at the level required by accounting to track labor costs.

The documents recorded what accounting required. Below the foreman level, the men appear in those records as a cost of labor. The construction seasons at High Bridge were governed by the temperature requirements for hydraulic mortar to set on one hand, and the heat of the Virginia summer on the other. The Appomattox valley in July and August trapped heat the way river valleys in hilly and mountainous terrain do.

The walls held the summer air in the chasm, and the river’s moisture kept humidity against the stone, the clay, and the scaffolding platforms. The direct sun reflected off the brick surfaces of the upper pier levels added a radiant heat load to the ambient temperature at the valley floor that the construction records did not oblige the South Side Railroad to document. The piers were built through those summers at the rate the setting schedule allowed. In the winters, brick construction stopped.

The colder months saw carpentry, ironwork, and the preparation of materials for the next season. The two construction seasons required by the pier program were Virginia construction seasons, bounded in their beginning and end by conditions, materials, and weather. When the last pier reached its designed height and the bridge carpenters began setting the Howe truss spans between the pier tops, the structure the South Side Railroad had built across the Appomattox valley became visible in its full extent from the high ground above the valley rim on both banks. Twenty-one masonry brick piers rose from the valley floor to heights ranging from 40 to 125 feet depending on their position in the valley’s cross-section, carrying a wooden superstructure of Howe truss spans across a total bridge length of approximately 2,400 feet.

The height of the bridge deck above the Appomattox River at the deepest part of the valley crossing was 125 feet. No railroad bridge then in service in the United States carried its deck at that height and that length of crossing. The structure was a record in its specific dimensions of height and length in American railroad bridge construction in 1854, and an achievement built by a regional railroad of moderate capital serving the tobacco counties of rural Virginia, because the valley at Farmville had left the engineers no alternative to the scale the design required. The first trains across the high bridge confirmed what the engineering analysis had established.

The piers carried the weight without any settlement. The wooden spans carried the loads of the South Side’s locomotives without any damage to their framing. The track held its line across the valley according to the alignment the engineers had set. The crossing worked.

What the bridge carried over the next decade was the agricultural traffic of the South Side counties: tobacco, grain, and livestock moving east toward Petersburg, and goods and materials of the eastern commercial economy moving west into the interior. The South Side Railroad was not the busiest railroad in Virginia. But it was the only railroad connection the counties it served possessed, and the bridge the bricklayers and Irish laborers had raised across the Appomattox valley was the only significant crossing for the traffic that needed to pass over it. By 1861, the nature of what the high bridge carried had changed in ways the railroad’s original shareholders had not anticipated.

By 1864, the South Side Railroad had become a supply line of military importance in a war that made the railroad lines of the Virginia interior vital to the survival of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, operating from its defensive lines around Petersburg and Richmond. The railroad built to carry tobacco was carrying ammunition, provisions, and troop reinforcements along the western axis of the Confederate supply system. The high bridge was the crossing point on that axis. Every train supporting the Confederate supply line west of Petersburg crossed the Appomattox valley over the piers the bricklayers had raised in the summers of 1852 and 1853.

The structure had been built originally for a regional shipping economy. It now functioned as a military asset whose loss would directly affect the operational capacity of an army of eighty thousand men. On the morning of April 6, 1865, a column of Union cavalry under Brigadier General Theodore Read moved ahead of pursuing Union infantry with orders to destroy the high bridge before the retreating Army of Northern Virginia could use it. The Confederate withdrawal from the Petersburg lines had been underway since the night of April 2.

Lee’s army was moving west along the South Side Railroad corridor toward Lynchburg and the supplies Lee had been told awaited him at Appomattox Station. The army moving along that corridor needed the crossing at the high bridge. Without it, the retreating forces would have to descend into the Appomattox valley, cross the river, and climb out again, adding hours and miles to a movement already under pressure in the rear and short of the supplies that had run out in the Petersburg lines. Read’s cavalry reached the approaches to the high bridge on the morning of the sixth.

Confederate infantry, placed by Major General William Mahone to cover the withdrawal, engaged Read’s force before it reached the bridge and forced it back. The engagement was brief. Read was killed in the fighting. The Confederate rear guard held the bridge approaches long enough for the main column to begin its crossing.

The Army of Northern Virginia crossed the high bridge on the evening of April 6 and into the morning of April 7. The retreating column used both the railroad bridge and the parallel wagon bridge in the valley floor to move infantry, artillery, and wagon trains across the Appomattox. When the Confederate rear guard cleared the north bank, army engineers set fire to both bridges. The wagon bridge lost four spans to the fire before Union engineers reached the south bank and worked to extinguish it.

The railroad bridge was fired at its southern end. The fire spread through the dry timber truss structure and burned several spans before it was brought under control. The fire damage was confined to the timber. The brick piers beneath the burned spans were unaffected.

They had carried the weight of an army crossing under military pressure and remained standing while the structure above them burned. When the flames were out, the piers stood as the bricklayers had built them in the summer heat of the Appomattox valley twelve years before. Union engineers assessed the damage and made the crossing passable for the pursuing Union infantry. The Union army crossed the high bridge on April 7.

Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House on April 9. The high bridge’s brick piers had been tested through the most intense forty-eight hours in their history and showed no indication of failure. The South Side Railroad was repaired after the war and returned to service. The damaged timber spans were replaced with improved structures.

The brick piers, inspected after the fire and found structurally sound, continued in service as the foundation of the repaired bridge and of the subsequent superstructure replacements the railroad’s needs required over the following decades. The South Side Railroad was consolidated into the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio Railroad, and those lines became part of the Norfolk and Western Railway in 1882. Norfolk and Western operated the High Bridge crossing throughout the following century, replacing the wooden, then iron, then steel superstructures as loads increased and materials aged, while the brick piers built in 1852-1853 continued to carry everything the railroad placed upon them. The engineers who had designed them in the late 1840s had provided them with additional load capacity, a practice followed by construction engineers of that era when the tools for precise load calculation were less developed than the risks of misjudgment required.

That additional capacity allowed the piers to survive the transition from the light locomotives of 1854 to the heavier steam equipment of the postwar decades, on through the heaviest freight locomotives. Norfolk and Western continued operations across its network through the twentieth century. Without the structural failures that a less conservative design might have produced, the company eventually rationalized its line, and the High Bridge crossing was retired from active railroad service. Ownership of the structure was transferred to the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The brick piers the South Side Railroad originally built now carry the High Bridge Trail, a pedestrian and bicycle path operated as a state park that crosses the Appomattox River valley at the same height the railroad engineers had chosen in the 1840s. If you walk that trail, you cross the valley above the piers the bricklayers raised. The crossing is about 2,400 feet from the south bank approach to the north. The Appomattox River runs 125 feet below the deck surface at the central spans.

The valley walls are the same walls between which the construction crews worked in the summers of 1852 and 1853. The interpretive signs on the High Bridge Trail record the battle of April 6, 1865, the events of Lee’s retreat, and the Union pursuit that ended at Appomattox Court House three days later. They record the South Side Railroad’s role in the Confederate supply system during the war years. They record the structural history of the crossing and the successive generations of superstructures the railroad placed on the original piers.

They record the engineering of the line and the construction company contracted to build it. The Virginia farmers who supplied the hired workforce appear in the South Side Railroad’s financial records at the level the contract system required for recording financial transactions between parties with legal standing. The workers those contracts supplied appear in the construction records at the level the hiring economy required for tracking the total cost of the labor provided. The farmers’ names are in the records because the records tracked payments between property owners.

The workers’ names are in those records at the level the system required to account for them as a cost element of the piers. The surviving South Side Railroad construction records held in the Virginia archives reflect the accountings of the hiring system at the level that system’s operation required. Whether the time records of the work crews, which would have contained the names of individuals below the level of supervisors, were preserved in their original form and remain accessible in the archives holding the South Side Railroad documents is a question the engineering histories of the High Bridge structure have not fully or openly addressed. The piers have been documented, the engineering documented, the farmers’ transactions documented at the level the financial accounts required.

The men who did the work appear in those accounts as a monthly cost at the rate set by the hiring contracts. The brick in the High Bridge piers has stood in the Appomattox valley for 170 years. It is the same brick the workers laid in the summers of 1852 and 1853. A brick pier properly bonded with hydraulic mortar to precise compression specifications retains no trace of the hands that built it.

It retains only the evidence of the quality of the bond and the mortar. The High Bridge piers have provided that evidence across 170 years of service under train loads beyond what the locomotives of 1854 imposed, through the forty-eight hours of April 1865 when the structure itself bore the weight of two armies and the fire of a withdrawing rear guard within hours, through floods and freeze-thaw cycles in the Virginia Piedmont, through a century and a half of seasons. The evidence the piers provided is evidence of work done with precision by people who understood what they were building and constructed it to a standard the materials have not disproven since. The trail crosses the valley above what they built.

The signs on the trail record the battle, the railroad, and the crossing operation. The men who laid the brick appear in the South Side Railroad’s account books as a labor cost of the piers. They exist in those books in accordance with what the accounting conventions of the hiring economy required. They do not exist in those books as people who built the tallest and highest railroad bridge in the United States in 1854.

The piers are still there. The valley is still there. The river still runs 125 feet below the bridge deck on a summer afternoon, exactly as it ran below the scaffolding in the summers before the bridge existed. The brick is the brick they laid.

The record of who laid it exists in the accounts at the level the system required. It does not exist in the accounts at the level that puts a name on a commemorative plaque.