The bricklayer stood at the bottom of the Appomattox River valley beneath Farmville, Virginia, setting the lower courses of a stone pier that had already risen thirty feet above the valley floor. The pier still had more than ninety feet to climb before it reached the height where the wooden bridges of the South Side Railroad would rest upon it. Around him lay the gorge that the Appomattox had carved through the Virginia Piedmont across 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 in the valley bottom was cold in the early morning, trapped against the clay walls by the midday sun, so that heat and humidity accumulated together until the workday ended and the river lowered the temperature once more. The pier he was building would be one of twenty-one piers distributed across the valley floor from the south bank to the north. The tallest would reach a height of 125 feet above the surface of the river.

The wooden bridge that would rest on them once the piers were complete would carry the South Side Railroad across an obstacle that was not a matter of width but of depth. The valley carved by the Appomattox lay below the grade level that the railroad had to maintain if the crossing was to function as a train passage rather than a descent into the gorge and a climb out of it 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, fordable in the dry season, and bridgeable in all seasons with a structure of modest span.

What made the Appomattox at the high bridge one of the most significant engineering challenges on the entire route of the South Side Railroad was not the river but the valley. Below the surface of the surrounding Piedmont plateau, the Appomattox ran at this location in the bottom of a cut that placed the river surface about 125 feet beneath the high ground on both sides, enclosed by walls sloped so steeply that any train attempting to reach the crossing at the required grade from either side would have to descend a mile down to the river and climb a mile away from it, adding two hundred feet of elevation change to every train movement across the Appomattox for the 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 created to serve.

Any crossing that imposed a climb and descent of this magnitude on every train using it would reduce the operational capacity of the railroad across that section in ways that no later improvements in equipment or track could correct, because the inefficiency lay in the geography itself. Engineers of the South Side Railroad measured 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 established under a charter from 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, westward to Lynchburg, the interior market of Virginia where goods arriving from the Richmond commercial system connected with valley traffic heading south and west. The 123 miles of South Side track crossed terrain that was acceptable by the standards of the Virginia plateau until the line reached the Appomattox valley at Farmville. The Appomattox at that location could not be managed 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 that the engineers had been able to maintain across the Piedmont descended into a valley system that would have broken the grade without a structure of unusual scope.

The South Side 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 primary railroad, the only connection that the tobacco, grain, and livestock economy of those counties possessed to the markets and ports they depended on. The crossing at the 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 they would be required to build there.

The question facing the engineering department of the South Side Railroad in the late 1840s, when the route surveys were complete and the alignment fixed, was not whether the Appomattox should be crossed at a great height. The route had settled that question. The real question was what material would be used for the crossing. Wooden construction was faster and cheaper in initial capital than any stone alternative, and it required no quarrying operations or kilns near the site.

Wood was the dominant material in American railroad bridge construction through the 1830s and 1840s, and the bridge carpenters and timber framing systems that had developed across those decades were available and understood. The objections to wood in the scale of the High Bridge were the same objections that applied to wood in any major railroad crossing. Wood decayed under the stress of loads and weather and required rebuilding at intervals. The operating budget of the railroad would have to account for that throughout the operating life of the line.

At the height of the high bridge piers, replacing a decayed wooden span meant working at elevations that increased the cost and difficulty of every construction operation, making the financial saving of wooden construction over masonry secondary. The initial cost mattered less the higher the structure stood 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 that the finances of the South Side Railroad could not easily bear at the pace the construction schedule demanded.

What the Virginia Piedmont possessed in abundance was clay. And what clay became when properly burned in kilns erected near the construction site was brick. What brick, well bonded with hydraulic mortar and proportioned for the compressive loads that the structure would impose on it over an operating life extending beyond any practical planning horizon, could achieve was what the Thomas Suspension Bridge at Rellay had been doing 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 piers of the High Bridge were to be built of brick.

The superstructure above them would be of the wooden Howe truss type, adjustable in service and replaceable at the end of its useful life, resting on stone piers 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. Burning brick on site was the standard solution for large construction projects located far from brick suppliers, and the clay deposits of the Virginia Piedmont were readily accessible to the site to support the kiln output that the pier construction program demanded. The kilns produced brick in the quantities the construction schedule required, and the brick was carried 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 over a foundation area that the valley floor geology could support without differential settlement, to a narrower section at the top of the pier where the wooden spans rested on the capstones. This taper served two structural purposes. It reduced the dead weight that the pier itself imposed on its foundation as the height increased. It maintained the structural capacity to carry the live loads of the trains above by keeping the compressive stress on the masonry within the required range.

The combination of brick and mortar could withstand repeated loading cycles throughout an operating life that the designers had planned in decades rather than years. The bonding pattern, the arrangement of courses tying the face brick to the backing courses and distributing the compressive load across the full cross-section of the pier, was the decisive quality variable in this type 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. Piers built with voids in the interior backing courses or with weak joint fillers in the faces showed signs of deterioration over time, as the loading cycles of the railroad found any gaps in the bond that failed to close.

The bricklayers of the High Bridge carried out 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 a working surface rises above the fixed landmarks 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 tree canopy dropped below the working scaffold at the positions of the tallest piers.

Above eighty feet, the valley walls on both sides were beneath the scaffold. Above one hundred feet, the working platform stood 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 edge of the platform and nothing between him and the full distance but the scaffold planks he stood on and whatever wooden railing the construction company had placed at the platform edge. The loads moving through the temporary structures to the working level, the platforms of brick and mortar tubs swinging on ropes and the wooden hoisting equipment, were the hazards that the men receiving and directing them knew as well as they knew the characteristics of the tools they used every day. The construction company accounts record the progress of 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 the 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, taking his share before the remainder reached the worker. At the High Bridge in 1852, the dominant 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 system that the plantation economy of Virginia had developed over previous generations as a mechanism for employing forced labor in the wage labor markets required by railroad, canal, and quarry construction operations. The hiring system worked as follows. A Virginia planter who owned enslaved workers with skills or physical capacity exceeding 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 planter.

The planter 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 planter the assurance that the person he owned would return at the end of the hiring period in a condition fit for further labor. The hiring contract bound the construction company to the planter.

The enslaved worker was the subject of the contract, not a party to it. The hiring ledgers of the South Side Railroad construction survive partially in the Virginia archives. Planters appear in those ledgers by name, with the number of workers they supplied and the monthly rate the railroad paid. The individual workers supplied by these owners appear in the ledgers at the level required by the hiring economy for financial tracking: a total count at the applicable rate per month.

Some individual names appear in the records at the level required by the accounts of the planter’s own farm to track his workers as productive assets. In most cases, the total 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 every brick in its bed of mortar, checked the courses for alignment, and moved to the next course appear in the construction accounts of the South Side Railroad 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 planters who supplied them. Rarely do they appear as men. The Irish laborers who worked on the High Bridge construction alongside the hired workforce held legal status as free men who were paid in cash and directly, rather than through another person collecting the value of their work. The practical gap between the economic circumstances of a free Irish laborer on a railroad construction site in rural Virginia in 1852 and those of a hired enslaved laborer on the same site was real and significant in the dimension of how each group appears in the surviving construction records.

That distance was smaller. The Irish laborer, whose occupational level fell below that of a foreman, appears in the payroll records of the South Side Railroad at the level required by accounting to track labor costs. The documents recorded what accounting required. Below the level of foreman, the men appear in those records as a cost of labor.

The construction seasons at the High Bridge were governed by the temperature requirements for the setting of hydraulic mortar on one hand and the heat of a Virginia summer on the other. The Appomattox valley in July and August trapped heat the way river valleys in mountainous and hilly terrain do. The walls sealed the summer air in the cut, and the moisture of the river kept humidity in contact with the stone, the clay, and the scaffold platforms. The direct sun reflected off the brick surfaces of the upper pier levels added a radiant heat load to the ambient temperature of the valley floor that the construction records did not oblige the South Side Company to document.

The piers were built through those summers at the rate the curing schedule permitted. In the winters, brick construction stopped. The colder months saw carpentry, blacksmithing, 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 design height and the bridge carpenters began installing the Howe truss spans between the pier caps, the structure that the South Side Railroad had built across the Appomattox valley became visible in its full extent from the heights above the valley edge on both banks. Twenty-one brick piers rose from the valley floor to heights ranging from forty to 125 feet depending on their position in the cross-section of the valley, carrying a wooden superstructure of Howe truss spans across a total bridge length of about 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 over that length of crossing.

The structure was record-setting in its specific dimensions of height and length in American railroad bridge construction in 1854. It was an achievement built by a regionally capitalized railroad 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 to cross 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 showing any damage to their structures. The track maintained its alignment across the valley according to the line the engineers had laid out. The crossing worked. What the bridge carried over the following decade was the agricultural traffic of the South Side counties: tobacco, grain, and livestock moving east toward Petersburg, and manufactured goods and the materials of the eastern commercial economy moving west into the interior.

The South Side 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 original stockholders of the railroad had not anticipated. By 1864, the South Side Railroad had become a supply corridor of military importance in a war that made the railroad lines of interior Virginia 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 that the bricklayers had raised in the summers of 1852 and 1853. The structure had been built originally for a regional freight 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 the 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 were waiting for him at Appomattox Station.

The army moving along that corridor needed the crossing at the High Bridge. Without the bridge, the retreating forces would have to descend into the Appomattox valley, ford the river, and climb out again, adding hours and miles to a movement already under pressure from the rear and short of the supplies that had run out in the Petersburg lines. Read’s cavalry force reached the approaches to the High Bridge on the morning of April 6. 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 approaches to the bridge 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 the railroad bridge and the parallel wagon bridge in the valley bottom to move infantry, artillery, and wagon trains across the Appomattox. When the Confederate rear guard evacuated 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 wooden 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 stood firm while the structure above them burned.

When the flames went out, the piers remained exactly as the bricklayers had built them in the summer heat of the Appomattox valley twelve years earlier. 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 brick piers of the High Bridge had been tested through the most intense forty-eight hours in their history and had shown no indication of failure. The South Side Railroad was repaired after the war and returned to service. The damaged wooden spans were replaced with improved structures. The brick piers, inspected after the fire and found structurally sound, continued to serve as the foundation for the repaired bridge and for the subsequent superstructure replacements required by the railroad’s needs over the following decades.

The South Side Railroad was merged 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 next century, replacing the wooden superstructure with iron and then steel as loads increased and materials aged. The brick piers built in 1852 and 1853 continued to carry everything the railroad placed upon them. The engineers who had designed them in the late 1840s had provided them with extra load-bearing 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 extra capacity allowed the piers to withstand the transition from the light locomotives of 1854 to the heavier steam equipment of the postwar decades, on up to the heaviest freight locomotives. Norfolk and Western operated across its network throughout the twentieth century. Without the structural failures that could have resulted from a less conservative design, 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 originally built by the South Side Railroad now carry the High Bridge Trail, a pedestrian and bicycle path operated as a state park crossing the Appomattox River valley at the same elevation the railroad engineers had chosen in the 1840s. If you walk the trail, you cross the valley over the piers that the bricklayers raised. The crossing is about 2,400 feet from the south bank approach to the north. The Appomattox runs 125 feet below the surface of the crossing at the center 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 role of the South Side Railroad 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 atop the original piers.

They record the engineering of the route and the railroad company that contracted the construction. The Virginia planters who supplied the hired workforce appear in the financial records of the South Side Company at the level required by the contracting system to record financial transactions between parties with legal standing. The workers supplied by those contracts appear in the construction records at the level required by the hiring economy to track the total cost of the labor provided. The planters’ names exist in the records because they tracked payments between property owners.

The workers’ names exist in those records at the level the system required to account for them as a cost element of the piers. The construction records of the South Side Railroad that survive in the Virginia archives reflect the accounts of the hiring system at the level the operation of that system 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 addressed. The piers are documented.

The engineering is documented. The planter transactions are documented at the level required by the financial accounts. 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 piers of the High Bridge in the Appomattox valley has remained 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 compressive 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 piers at the High Bridge have provided that evidence across 170 years of service under train loads exceeding anything the engines 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 retreating rear guard within the space of hours, through floods and freeze-thaw cycles in the Virginia Piedmont, through a century and a half of seasons.

The evidence the piers provide is evidence of work done with precision by people who understood what they were building and constructed it to a standard that the materials have not contradicted since. The trail crosses the valley over what they built. The signs on the trail record the battle, the railroad, and the crossing. The men who laid the brick appear in the ledgers of the South Side Railroad as a labor cost for the piers.

They exist in those ledgers in accordance with what the accounting conventions of the hiring economy required. They do not exist in those ledgers as the 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 surface of the bridge on a summer afternoon, exactly as it ran beneath 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.