In the last week of November 1872, a worker on the staging above the Niagara River at Black Rock, New York, looked downstream toward Lake Erie and saw what he had been told to watch for. The surface of the river had changed. The current, which ran clear and dark and fast in open water, was now carrying a thin layer of brittle ice on its face. It was the frazil ice that forms in water moving too quickly to freeze solid, the first sign that the temperature of the upper Niagara had dropped below the freezing point and that the ice season had arrived.
He climbed down from the staging. The work of driving piles and securing the timbers of the temporary staging in a current averaging five miles an hour had not stopped because of the cold. It had been going on since the spring of 1871, but the ice brought it to a halt. When the ice reached the upper Niagara, the character of the river changed in a way that the men who had built bridges over the Ohio or the Missouri did not immediately understand.
The Niagara is not a long river. It runs thirty-five miles from its outlet at Lake Erie in Buffalo to its arrival at Lake Ontario in Queenston. In those thirty-five miles it drops 326 feet. Most of that drop occurs at the falls, but there is enough of it in the upper section, where the contractor was building the International Railway Bridge for the Grand Trunk Railway, that the current in the Black Rock channel ran at a speed that commanded the respect of every man working in it.
What that current carried when it began to move ice was not the kind that forms on a still pond or a slow stream. It was ice produced by a river draining the collected waters of four of the five Great Lakes, Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie, through a thirty-five-mile channel at a volume of 212,000 cubic feet per second in an average season. In a hard winter, the frazil ice forming in the upper river accumulated along the shore and in the eddies behind the staging, the piles, and the cofferdams, until it consolidated into anchor ice on the riverbed and ice jam along the banks. The ice jam at Black Rock could reach four feet thick in a cold winter.
The ice fields that flowed out of Lake Erie, when the lake released what it had accumulated over the winter in the March thaw, could cover vast areas and pile against any obstruction in the channel with forces that engineers tried to calculate from historical records, but the river, when it decided to move, delivered them according to its own accounting. This is the story of building a railway bridge across the Niagara River at the only location on the upper river where the current permits navigation, and therefore the place where any structure put in the river had to be opened to allow ships to pass. It is the story of the ironworkers, pile-driving crews, masons, and divers who built the International Railway Bridge between 1871 and 1873 in a river that did not slow down for construction schedules and did not soften its edge for the men working in it. The men who built it exist in the payroll records of the contractors who hired them, in whatever form those records have survived.
The bridge itself stood for fifty years. The men who built it have no names on it. To understand why crossing the Niagara at Black Rock was a different engineering problem from crossing any other river on the American continent at that stage of bridge-building history, you have to understand what the Niagara River is and where its power comes from. The Niagara is the outlet of Lake Erie.
Erie is the fourth largest of the Great Lakes by surface area and the shallowest, with an average depth of 62 feet across its basin. Its drainage includes the waters of the three upper Great Lakes, Superior, Michigan, and Huron, which pass through the St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, and the Detroit River into the western end of Erie at Detroit.
The combined drainage area of the upper Great Lakes is about 263,000 square miles before the water exits through the Niagara River. When that water leaves Lake Erie, it enters a channel that for the first twenty miles above the falls is relatively wide and relatively shallow by Great Lakes standards. The width at Black Rock, where the International Bridge was to be built, is about 900 feet across the navigation channel. The depth of the navigation channel ranges from fifteen to thirty feet depending on river level.
The current moves in ordinary conditions at four to five miles an hour. In the spring flood season, when the accumulated snowmelt of the upper basin pushes Lake Erie to its high-water mark and the discharge through the Niagara rises toward flood peak, the surface velocity in the main channel at Black Rock reaches seven miles an hour or more. A current at seven miles an hour is not a current a bridge contractor in 1871 could work against freely with the equipment available to him. It is not a current in which the guides of a timber pile-driving machine could be fixed without temporary bracing anchored in something more solid than the sediment of the riverbed.
It is not a current in which a diver in a canvas suit and copper helmet could move freely along the channel bottom while inspecting the pile foundations. It was a current that moved the contractor’s temporary structures in the International Bridge again and again during construction, and it required continuous engineering and re-engineering of the temporary anchoring systems, the timber cribs, the guide piles, and the cable mooring systems. Those were not mentioned in the reports of the bridge’s completion that appeared in the railway trade press in 1873, because the press was interested in span lengths, estimated load capacity, and the name of the engineer, not in the ways men anchored themselves in the river water long enough to do the work that those spans required. The engineer was Casimir Stanislaus Gzowski.
He was a Polish-born military officer who came to Canada in the aftermath of the failed European uprisings of 1830 and rebuilt himself within the British colonial system to become one of the most accomplished infrastructure engineers in the Province of Canada. He had built sections of the Grand Trunk Railway across Ontario. He had built the suspension bridge at Niagara in the 1840s. He understood from years of standing at river crossing sites what river work in the Great Lakes basin required, reading the difference between what the initial surveys said and what the river actually did once the construction season began and the current delivered its own opinion of the plans.
The design Gzowski set out required four stone piers in the river plus the abutments on each bank. The piers would carry a swing bridge in the middle of the navigation channel, a span that could rotate on its central pier to open the river for navigation when ships needed to pass, and fixed truss spans on either side of the swing bridge, extending the line across the full width of the river. The pier foundations were the problem the contractor had to solve before anything else could proceed, and the problem was the same at every pier site, but worst at the center. Under the riverbed at Black Rock, beneath the layer of coarse gravel and stones that the current kept in motion during high water, lay a series of materials that the initial borings described in general terms.
Under the gravel was glacial till, a compacted mixture of clay, gravel, and broken rock left by the retreating ice sheets across the Niagara Peninsula ten thousand years ago. Below that till, at depths that varied by location, was the Lockport dolomite, the same limestone that the Niagara River had been cutting through for ten thousand years to form the gorge below the falls. The limestone was good bearing material. At the site of the main swing bridge pier, it lay thirty-five feet below the surface of the riverbed and sixty feet below the water surface at average river level.
The method for reaching it was the timber crib. Timber crib foundations do not use compressed air to keep water out of a working chamber. They do not send men into an enclosed space below the water surface to excavate by hand. A structure is built in open water, then sunk to the riverbed, and its cells are filled with broken stone, relying on the weight of the fill and the grip of the timber on the bed surface to hold the foundation against the lateral forces of current and ice.
The cribs for the International Bridge were built of heavy timber, white oak and yellow pine in the dimensions available from the mills of western New York, designed as a rectangular grid to receive the weight of the limestone after the crib was placed on the riverbed. The outer walls were sheathed with solid planking to resist the pressure of the current. The cutting edge at the base was fitted with an angle iron to resist the gravel of the riverbed as the crib was lowered into position. The men built the cribs on shore in the construction yards behind the Black Rock site in the winter and spring of 1871 before work began in the river.
The carpenters who cut, assembled, and fastened the crib parts were not engineers. They were carpenters who had learned the woodworking trade through whatever work was available in western New York and Ontario in the decades following the completion of the Erie Canal. They had worked on the canal itself, on the grain elevators of the Buffalo waterfront, on the mill buildings of the manufacturing towns along the lake shore, and on the construction of the railways that had been spreading across the region since the late 1840s. They understood white oak and yellow pine the way the ship carpenters of the Howard yard in New Albany did, by hand, by eye, and by the weight of a lifetime’s accumulated experience in reading timber before cutting it.
Their names are not in the engineering reports. They are in the contractors’ payroll records, which I have not been able to locate in any collection I have been able to examine for this purpose. After the crib sections were framed and sheathed, they had to be launched and towed into position in the navigation channel against the current of Black Rock, which in the spring of 1871 was running at the fullest speed of its water. The towing was done by steam tugs operating out of Black Rock harbor.
The tugs working Lake Erie and the upper Niagara River in the early 1870s were wooden side-wheel and propeller steamboats, from sixty to 150 tons, designed for harbor work and short-distance towing of timber rafts and grain vessels within the protected waters of the upper Great Lakes. Moving a timber crib weighing 400 tons through a current of five miles an hour in a channel 900 feet wide, and placing it within an acceptable margin of accuracy in its designed position on the riverbed, was a task of a different order from moving timber rafts in a quiet harbor. The tug captains who ran those boats knew the Black Rock channel well from years of working in it. Whether that knowledge was sufficient for the specific demands of placing cribs in a river at flood stage is a question the construction records would have answered.
Those construction records are not available. What is in the records, in the newspaper reports of the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser that covered the bridge’s construction in the terms used by the railway press, is that the project saw delays attributed to river conditions. The reports do not specify which conditions, or in which seasons they occurred. They do not name the men on the tugs or the men on the crib timbers as the cribs were maneuvered into place in midstream.
The reports that survived were interested in schedules and in the general progress of the railway project. They were not interested in the men standing waist-deep in the water adjusting the position of the crib by hand, in a current that was doing its best to take the whole structure downstream without them. Once the crib was released, it was controlled by cables running upstream and tied to temporary piles already driven into the riverbed above the pier site. The piles were driven from the pile-driving barge, a flat-bottomed vessel equipped with a steam hammer for driving piles.
The hammer was raised by a steam winch, then released by gravity onto the head of the pile. The pile-driving barge had to be held in position while the piles were driven. It was held by anchor cables running out to shore anchors and to previously driven permanent piles. Every operation in the river required the prior completion of another operation in the river.
And every operation was subject to the river’s decision about when it would allow cooperation. The man at the anchor winch on the pile-driving barge was just a deckhand. His name is not in the engineering reports. He did work that required him to pay out and haul in a mooring line in coordination with the movement of the current and the shouted signals of the boat’s foreman, who was watching the position of the pile, the depth gauge, and the face of the river all at once amid the noise of the steam engine.
The coordination required was not exceptional by the standards of what river construction work had always demanded. It was the ordinary level of judgment and physical focus that every man in that work brought to every shift. This is not in any published account of the International Bridge I have found. The winter of 1871 to 1872 brought the work in the river to a halt.
The Niagara above the falls in a hard winter is not merely a cold river. It is a river that forms and releases enormous quantities of ice in a sequence that the men who worked on it in 1871 had never before encountered at that scale. The anchor ice that forms on the streambed clings to the foundations of temporary structures. The shore ice that accumulates along the banks can reach four feet thick, and it moves when the temperature rises above freezing, not gradually, but in sudden surges that the men who lived along the upper Niagara knew from experience, while the men who had come to the site from interior projects had no experience of it.
An ice jam at Black Rock, a compression of moving ice masses pushing against an obstruction in the channel, could exert lateral forces against a temporary cofferdam or a support structure that the designer had estimated from incomplete historical records, and the river delivered them at loads the estimates had not fully accounted for. The winter of 1871 to 1872 produced an ice jam at Black Rock. The jam formed against the construction platforms and the temporary anchor piles that had been left in place when work was suspended in November, and the ice moved those piles. The contractors re-anchored them in the spring.
There is no record in any account I have found of whether any man was on the construction platforms when the jam formed. No construction accident records are available for the International Bridge project. This means either that no injuries occurred, which would be remarkable for a project of this length and complexity in a river of this nature, or that the records have not survived in a form that has been systematically examined, which is the normal state of construction injury records from the 1870s, when reporting obligations on contractors were minimal and the incentives for keeping detailed injury records were small. The ironwork for the bridge trusses was fabricated by the Detroit Bridge and Iron Works of Michigan.
The truss sections, the diagonal and vertical members, the top and bottom chord sections, and the floor beams were shipped to the Black Rock site by rail and barge, and the ironworkers erected them from temporary work platforms cantilevered out from the completed piers over the water. The ironworkers who erected the trusses at Black Rock were practicing a trade that had developed as a specific skill set in North America since the construction of the first large iron railway bridges in the 1850s: the hanging, fitting, and riveting of structural iron members over open water and at great heights, work that required a comfort with exposure to the air and with working at altitude that not every man who arrived at the construction site possessed on his first morning on the platform. Riveting in 1872 was done by a four-man crew. The heater managed a portable coke forge placed on the platform and brought the rivets up to working temperature.
The precise cherry-red color that meant the iron was soft enough to be driven without cracking. The catcher received the hot rivet tossed by the heater, caught it in a sheet-iron cone, and inserted it into the hole. The holder-up held a dolly bar against the head of the rivet from the back side. The riveter struck the tail of the rivet with a ball-peen hammer until it upset and formed a second head.
A four-man crew working at a steady pace could drive about 300 rivets in a working day under favorable conditions. The conditions at Black Rock in the fall of 1872 were not permanently favorable. The platform was exposed to the winds coming off Lake Erie, which blew from the west and northwest in the autumn months with enough force to shake the unsupported platforms and to cool the iron rivets below working temperature faster than the heater could keep up. The ironworkers tied themselves to the platform when the wind strengthened.
They worked in the bitter cold because the bridge had a delivery date, and the iron was ready, and the piers were ready, and the railway needed the crossing in service before the end of the 1873 operating season. The swing span, the central element of the bridge and the span that rotated on its central pier to allow navigation, was the most mechanically demanding part of the structure. A swing span was not unusual on a navigable river in 1872. The technology of building a balanced swing span on a central pier rotating freely on a center bearing, with its ends carried by end roller wheels when in the closed position, had been developed in the eastern movable railway bridges during the 1850s and 1860s and was well known to specialists.
What was unusual about the Black Rock swing was the length of the span that rotated, and the strength of the current it had to resist when closed in the spring flood, with the pressure of the upper Niagara water against the truss from the upstream side. The central pier, the pivot pier, had to be positioned with the precision that determined the straightness of everything placed upon it afterward. The swing in the closed position had to align within no more than one inch with the rest bearings of the two approach spans at both ends simultaneously. That alignment depended on the pivot bearing being set vertically and perfectly level on the top of the stone pier, on the top of the pier being at the exact elevation and location specified in the design, and on the pier being built on foundations of materials that would not settle unevenly once the weight of the bridge was placed on them.
The masons who laid the stones of the Black Rock piers worked within the tradition of underwater hydraulic stone construction, established in American canals in the 1820s and developed in the major bridge projects of the following decades. Hydraulic lime mortar, which hardens by chemical reaction rather than by drying and is unaffected by water during the setting process, was the standard mortar for hydraulic construction in 1872. The limestone for the bridge piers was cut from quarries in the Lockport dolomite formation, the same formation the river had been cutting through for ten thousand years to make the gorge below the falls, and the stones were dressed to precise dimensions for the critical bearing surfaces at the top of each pier. The mason who leveled the bearing surface of the pivot used a precision level and a straightedge.
They were not engineering instruments. They were the tools of the mason’s trade. The degree of accuracy with which he could level that surface was the degree of skill in his hands and eyes acquired from every course of stone he had laid and every bearing surface he had leveled. His name is not in the engineering records.
He is in the payroll record of the masonry contractor, if that record still exists. What is in the record is that the swing bridge, when it was erected in the fall of 1872 and operated for the first time, aligned correctly with the approach spans at both ends simultaneously. The pivot bearing had been set correctly. The man who leveled the bearing surface had done his work accurately, and the mechanism it made possible worked as designed from the first time.
His name is not written on the bridge. The bridge opened to train traffic on November 3, 1873. The Grand Trunk Railway ran its first trains across on that date. Trains crossed the Niagara River for the first time at Black Rock on a fixed structure at a location that had only ever been crossed by ferry since humans began moving between what is now New York State and what is now Ontario.
Before the bridge opened, everything that crossed the Niagara above the falls crossed by ferry. The ferry at Black Rock had been in operation since the early nineteenth century. By the 1860s it had become the main crossing point for commercial traffic between the American and Canadian railway networks. Railway cars were moved across the Niagara by purpose-built ferries: large flat-bottomed vessels fitted with railway tracks on their decks, with loaded freight cars pushed aboard from shore installations on both banks.
A loaded freight car in the early 1870s weighed between twenty and thirty tons. A ferry carrying six cars moved between 120 and 180 tons of cars and cargo in a river whose current ran five miles an hour. The captains and crews of those ferries had worked that current for decades. They knew every eddy and every set of the channel between Black Rock and Fort Erie in every season and at every water level.
They knew what the ice did in winter and what the spring flood did to the ferry slip approaches when the upper basin emptied. They are not mentioned in the histories of the International Bridge. The bridge replaced them. And what they knew about that river left with them when their work faded away.
A loaded freight train could now cross from the United States into Canada without a ferry, in any weather and any season. The bridge was 2,660 feet long from abutment to abutment, spanning the full width of the navigation channel of the upper Niagara. The economic effects of that change were immediate. Goods that had waited at the ferry slips because of fog or ice or high water now moved without interruption.
Shippers on both sides of the border found that schedules could be kept in ways that had not been possible before. International border trade at the western end of Lake Erie moved more freely than it had since the border was drawn. All of that benefited the railways, the shippers, and the cities whose trade the bridge facilitated. It benefited the economies of two nations.
It did not benefit the man who worked the anchor winch on the pile-driving barge, or the mason who leveled the pivot bearing surface, or the worker who climbed down from the staging in November when the ice reached the upper river. The International Railway Bridge at Black Rock remained in service until 1925, when it was replaced by a new structure built on the same alignment. The original structure was dismantled. What remains on the site is the foundation of the piers that the newer bridge reused where the stonework was capable of carrying the new loads, and the river, which has remained the same river it always was.
The Niagara still runs at the pace it ran in 1872. It still forms anchor ice in winter, carries ice fields in the March thaw, and runs fast and brown in the May flood when the upper basin empties. The boats on the river now are smaller and fewer, most of them recreational. Commercial traffic moved to roads and railways generations ago.
The ferry they use was built on an understanding of the river accumulated by the men of 1871 to 1873 over two and a half years of working in it. An understanding purchased through the anchor winch and the diver’s line and the forge in the November winds. Paid for in the physical terms that workers pay for knowledge of the places they work. The men who built the International Railway Bridge across the Niagara River exist in the payroll books of the contractors who hired them, in whatever form those books survive, which has not been systematically determined because no one has yet gone looking for them in the archives of western New York and Ontario with the specific purpose of reading their names aloud.
The engineering reports exist in the collections of engineering societies. The span lengths exist in the trade press. The engineer’s name exists in the official records. The man who climbed down from the staging when the ice reached the upper Niagara on a November morning in 1872 is not in any place where the person crossing the replacement bridge today would know where to look for him.
He built a crossing between two nations, across a river that did not make the crossing easy. He is in the current. He is in the ice. He is in the river that still runs fast and brown between New York and Ontario at Black Rock.
And his name is in the faded ink of a contractor’s ledger no one has yet read, waiting for someone to decide it is worth the search.
