On the morning of August 14, 1925, a riveter standing on a wooden platform above the Niagara River in Buffalo, New York, caught a hot rivet that had been tossed from a coal-fired forge anchored to the decking above him. He caught it in a tin can, turned it with his tongs, and drove it into a hole in a steel girder with four blows of a pneumatic hammer, while his partner on the opposite side pressed a metal bar against the other end to keep the rivet from punching through. The current passing beneath him, through the gap between the first completed pier and the second, was moving at nearly four miles an hour. The river was carrying the waters of Lake Erie toward Lake Ontario at its usual pace, a pace that did not stop for a man working on a platform eighty feet above it.
If he dropped the rivet, it was lost. If he fell himself, the current would carry him away before anyone on shore could do anything useful. He was one of hundreds of men working on the Peace Bridge that morning. The bridge had spent six months on its construction schedule.
The steel above him, the lower chord of the first section of the cantilevered bridge, was being assembled in sections lifted by a traveling crane that crept outward from the completed pier on rails running along the top chord of the growing structure. Below, the foundation of the pier he was working over had been laid the previous year. Its temporary cofferdams had been driven into the riverbed through forty feet of water, then pumped dry, and concrete poured down to the bedrock that soil surveys had indicated was there, and which was indeed there when the construction crews reached it, something that was not guaranteed simply because the survey had indicated it. He did not know he was building an international landmark.
He was building the thing in front of him, this link, this chord, this girder, for the wages paid by the American Bridge Company, which were more than he could earn in a Buffalo workshop that summer, and that was why he was here instead of there. The bridge would open on August 7, 1927. It would be called the Peace Bridge. It would commemorate a hundred years of peace between the United States and Canada, which was wonderful for the anniversary, but it was not the reason men built the bridge and showed up at the site with the early morning light every day.
They came because the river needed a crossing, and the work on the crossing provided their wages. To understand why there was no fixed road crossing over the Niagara River between Buffalo and Fort Erie until 1927, no bridge a truck could use, no route a car could cross, you have to understand what the Niagara River actually is. The Niagara is not a river in the usual sense of rivers. It is a strait.
It connects two great lakes, Lake Erie to the south at a higher elevation, with Lake Ontario to the north at a lower one. The water moving through it is not water gathered from a watershed. It is a drain for the upper Great Lakes. The entire discharge of Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, and Lake Huron, which empty into Lake Erie, leaves the Great Lakes system through the Niagara River and over Niagara Falls before reaching Lake Ontario and the St.
Lawrence River. The river is thirty-four miles long. It drops one hundred sixty feet over those thirty-four miles, most of it at the falls. What that means for the river at Buffalo, above the falls, is that it moves with force and intent.
It does not simply drift. It is headed toward a specific place constantly, regardless of whether the construction crew would prefer it to slow down. The main channel current at the Peace Bridge crossing reaches four miles an hour under normal conditions. In spring, when snowmelt and ice breakup from the upper basin push the discharge to its seasonal peak, it runs faster.
The riverbed at that site is rocky, made of limestone and shale, the same rock formations that lie beneath Niagara Falls a few miles downstream, but the surface above it is forty feet of fast water, and forty feet of fast water pushing against any structure you place in it is the condition you work in from the day you start to the day you finish. By 1920, the Niagara River at Buffalo had only one fixed crossing for traffic, the International Railway Bridge at Black Rock, a freight structure opened in 1873. It carried rail cars. It did not carry automobiles.
It was not a road bridge. The ferry service operating between Buffalo and Fort Erie since before the War of 1812 was still running, but a ferry service designed for an earlier age was not equipped for the volume of traffic generated by an urban area of half a million people on the American side and a growing industrial corridor on the Ontario side. Cars were piling up at the dock. Commercial trucks were waiting.
The river was the same width it had always been, and crossing it still took the same number of minutes it had always taken. The number of vehicles that needed to cross it every hour was an entirely different number from what the ferry was designed to handle. The demand for a fixed road crossing at Buffalo began in earnest after the First World War, when automobiles stopped being merely a pastime and became essential transportation in the industrial cities of the Great Lakes region. Buffalo in 1920 was the second-largest city in the United States.
It had a steel industry, a grain milling industry, a chemical complex, and a manufacturing base with daily commercial relations with the Ontario side of the border. A bridge at Buffalo would cut the international boundary at the point where that relationship was most direct and the existing connection was clearly failing. But building a bridge across an international navigable waterway was not merely an engineering matter. It was a matter of treaties.
It required the approval of both national governments, the International Joint Commission, the binational body established in 1909 to manage shared waters, the United States War Department, which regulated construction in navigable waters on the American side, and the Canadian Department of National Defence. The Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority was incorporated in 1921 by concurrent legislation of the New York State legislature and the Parliament of Canada. It then took three more years to reach the laying of the cornerstone. The approvals required negotiations between two national governments and two local governments at the state and provincial level.
The financing required a bond structure the market would accept and that projected toll revenue could cover. The engineering required a firm that had worked on bridges of similar span. The political will required a moment in which all of the above factors aligned at once. In 1924, those factors aligned.
The engineering was assigned to Modjeski, working under the direction of Edward Loeffler. The construction contract went to the American Bridge Company, a subsidiary of United States Steel, with the organizational capacity and construction experience to manage a multi-span steel bridge across an international river on a schedule of political dimensions; because a bridge commemorating a hundred years of peace between two nations was expected to open in the year that concluded that century, 1927, as the Bridge Authority publicly announced. The names of Loeffler, Waddell, and Hardesty were written into the engineering records. The men who built the bridge they designed are not in the engineering records.
They exist only in the payroll books. If this channel is where you go for the history of the men who built with their hands what others got credit for, subscribe now. These stories disappear the same way the men who made them disappeared, unrecorded, unacknowledged, unnamed on anything that lasts. The design the engineering team settled on was a five-span cantilevered truss bridge.
The cantilever configuration suited the site for reasons that were straightforward in the structural logic of that era. A cantilever arm could be constructed from each completed pier outward, extending the structure over the water without the need for temporary structures standing in the river during construction. Temporary structures in the Niagara River, in a current of four miles an hour, were not something you built if you had a practical alternative. The cantilever method provided that alternative.
The main navigation span over the main channel was set at 525 feet, sufficient for commercial shipping traffic between Lake Erie and the Welland Canal, which connects the Niagara River to Lake Ontario and required a navigational channel that any bridge at this site had to accommodate. The clearance above high water level was set at ninety-six feet. The total structure, including approach spans on both sides, extended to approximately 5,800 feet. The foundation material beneath the main channel piers, the limestone rock, lay at depths ranging from thirty-five to sixty feet below the river surface.
The rock at those depths was workable. The rock was not like the river, such as the Mississippi. The problem the Niagara River posed was not depth. The problem was the current and what the current does to structures you place in it while you work.
The temporary cofferdam for the main river piers consisted of wooden sheeting and steel piles driven into the riverbed from working barges anchored in the current, then pumped dry by continuously operating centrifugal pumps. The pumps ran because the cofferdam leaked. A cofferdam in a river moving at four miles an hour against steel sheeting always leaks at the points where the piles interlock. At the bottom where the sheeting met uneven rock, at any point where the river found a way through.
The pumps removed the leakage faster than it accumulated. When the pumps worked properly and the sheeting held, the men inside the cofferdam worked on a temporarily dry riverbed surrounded on all four sides by walls that the Niagara River constantly tested. The men who drove the cofferdam sheeting did so from barges held in place by anchor chains under constant load. The anchor chains never slackened because the current never eased.
Crane operators worked on those barges over moving water from a platform that moved with the river. Pile-driving operators drove steel sheeting into a rocky bottom that did not always accept the sheeting at the angle required by the plans, and adjustments had to be made in real time by men working from a barge in a river, on a problem the plans described but could not fully anticipate. This is not the work that appears in the commemorative volume published by the Bridge Authority in 1927. The commemorative volume describes the design.
It describes the span dimensions, the foundation depths, the navigational clearances, and the cost, approximately ten million dollars, within budget. It describes the opening ceremony. What it does not describe is what it meant to anchor a pile-driving platform in the Niagara River during November, with water temperatures dropping and the current still running, and the sheeting still needing to be driven deeper into a bottom that resisted it. The structural ironworkers who assembled the steel above the piers worked within a craft tradition that had developed on American bridge projects since the appearance of cantilever and truss bridge forms in the 1870s.
By 1924, ironwork had its own methods, its own crew hierarchy from heater to catcher to holder to riveter, and its own understanding of working on platforms above water, which new men learned from old men on their first jobs and which appeared in no manual published by any engineering firm. Mohawk ironworkers from the Kahnawake reserve south of Montreal had been present on major steel bridge projects across the northeastern United States and Canada since the 1880s, when men from the reserve first demonstrated, during the construction of the Victoria Bridge over the St. Lawrence River, their ability to work at heights above running water, a capacity contractors noted and exploited. They hired more Kahnawake men.
The men trained their brothers and sons. By the 1920s, Mohawk ironworkers were a known presence on projects from New York to Chicago, traveling to work as all craftsmen traveled to where the work was. Whether Kahnawake men worked on the Peace Bridge is a question the employment records of the American Bridge Company would answer if those records were fully preserved and indexed. They kept payroll records.
Whether the Peace Bridge project records survived in a form that would allow any researcher to systematically examine them for the names of structural ironworkers on the crew is not something the published histories of the bridge address. The published histories address the bridge itself. Think about what it meant to rivet a floor beam into place on the Peace Bridge in the summer of 1925, on platforms above the Niagara River while the structure was being assembled from the completed piers toward the center. The platform was wooden planks supported by iron brackets bolted to the steel already in place.
It extended outward as each new section was completed. Below it, the river was visible through the gaps. And not so far away that a man could not hear it. A low continuous sound under everything else, under the noise of the hammers and the shouting signals and the crane whistle.
The sound of something moving fast through a space not wide enough to muffle it. The riveting gang worked as a unit. Four men. The heater at the coal forge kept the rivets at the precise temperature that made them workable.
Not too hot and not too cold, because a rivet driven cold does not fill the hole properly, and a rivet too hot deforms under the hammer. He threw each rivet in a high arc toward the catcher. The catcher received it in a metal can and immediately placed it in the waiting hole while the heat was still in it. The holder pressed his bar against the other end to resist the hammer blows.
The riveter drove it home within the seconds available before the metal cooled past the point of workability. The interval between working heat and cooled rivet was measured in seconds, not minutes, in seconds. A crew that had worked together long enough to know each other’s timing made use of those seconds every time. A crew of men who had never worked together was slower, produced more cold rivets, more errors requiring re-drilling, and more delay in a schedule that tolerated no delay.
The American Bridge Company put experienced gangs on the Peace Bridge because experienced gangs were faster, and faster gangs met schedules. And the schedule for this bridge was political. The rivet heater at the forge on a platform above the Niagara River in October 1925, throwing rivets in an arc to the catcher’s can while a crane advanced another panel above him, is not in the commemorative book. He is in the payroll record if the record survived, listed by name and wage and week in a ledger kept by an accountant recording the entitlements of the men who made this construction possible.
Injuries occurred during the construction of the Peace Bridge. Deaths occurred. The specific number is a figure the surviving records document incompletely, and the published histories of the bridge do not address it directly. This was consistent with how construction deaths were handled on public works projects of that era.
The men who were killed or seriously injured are in whatever accident reports survived in the contractors’ records, in the administrative files of the Bridge Authority, and in newspaper reports of specific accidents at the time they occurred. They are not in the commemorative materials. Construction continued through two winters on the Niagara River, through January and February at Lake Erie, a cold that is not merely a theoretical idea. A cold carried by the river in ice debris from the upper lakes when the breakup begins, and the current pushes the ice through anything in its way.
It continued through the spring floods of 1925 and 1926, when the discharge from the upper basin raised the river level and its current speed simultaneously. The men working on the cofferdam pumps during those flood seasons were keeping pace with a river that was simultaneously higher and faster than usual, pushing harder against sheeting that had been in the water since the previous construction season, and on which winter had done what winter does to driven steel. The bridge was delivered to the Bridge Authority on schedule. Thirty-six months from the laying of the cornerstone to the opening.
For a five-span steel cantilever bridge across an international waterway, thirty-six months was not a relaxed pace. It was a pace maintained by men who worked under the conditions imposed by the Niagara River on its own timetable. The opening ceremony on August 7, 1927, was attended by the Prince of Wales, the Vice President of the United States, and the Prime Minister of Canada. They walked across the bridge.
They shook hands at the international boundary marker in the middle of the main span, the line dividing two nations and running across the limestone riverbed forty feet below the water. They were photographed doing so, and the images appeared in the newspapers of both countries and were preserved in the archives of both governments. The men who built the structure they were shaking hands over are not in the photographs. Some of them may have been in the crowd watching from the Buffalo side.
Most of them had moved on to the next job by August, because a craftsman waiting at a finished project for a ribbon-cutting ceremony is a craftsman not earning wages. They were elsewhere building the next thing and earning what the next job paid. The Peace Bridge still carries traffic between Buffalo and Fort Erie. It has been widened and reinforced over the decades, but it still stands essentially as built in 1927, on the piers that construction crews founded on bedrock through the cofferdams they held against the Niagara River for two construction seasons.
You can drive across it. You can stop in the middle and watch the river still moving at four miles an hour toward the falls, carrying the discharge of the upper Great Lakes along the same path it has always taken, indifferent to the structure above it. The bridge works. It works because the design was honest and the construction was precise, because the steel is where the plans put it, the connections are sound, and the piers rest on the rock the drillings promised.
A bridge is not a complicated philosophical matter. Either it holds or it does not. The Peace Bridge holds. It was built by men who knew what they were dealing with, a current that never stops, river ice out of season, work above water, a schedule of political dimensions, with no allowance for the problems the river might impose on its own schedule, and they built it properly.
That is not a small thing. It is the only thing that matters in any bridge. It stands. Their names are in the payroll books of the American Bridge Company.
Whether those books still exist in an accessible and indexed form, that is a question that cannot be answered with confidence. There is a Peace Bridge Authority archive in Buffalo. The administrative record of the bridge from 1921 to the present is documented. The workforce that built it is not documented in the same way, or in the same place, or with the same attention given to the dimensions of the bridge and the opening ceremony and the photograph of the Prince of Wales standing at the international boundary line over the river the workers bridged.
The bridge was named for peace between two nations. Peace between nations is something diplomats negotiate and historians measure. The bridge is steel and concrete. It rests on bedrock reached by men who worked inside enclosed basins in the Niagara River in January.
Its spans are connected by rivets that men threw and caught and set in the few seconds before the metal cooled. It stands in a river that still runs at four miles an hour, and will continue to run at that pace when everyone who ever crossed it is gone. The men who built it built the bridge properly. Their names deserve to be spoken in the same sentence as what they made.
They are in the ledgers, waiting for someone to look.
