In the last week of November 1872, a laborer working on a temporary scaffold 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 had been running clear, dark, and fast through open water, was now carrying a thin layer of brittle ice on its surface. It was the kind of ice that forms in water moving too quickly to freeze solid, the first sign that the upper Niagara had dropped below the freezing mark and that ice season had begun.
He climbed down from the scaffold. The work of driving piles and securing temporary scaffold timbers in a current averaging five miles per hour had not stopped because of the cold. The work had been going on since the spring of 1871, but now it was stopped by ice. When the ice reached the upper Niagara, the character of the river changed in a way the men who had built bridges across the Ohio or the Missouri had never faced and 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 river, where the contractor was building the International Railway Bridge for the Grand Trunk Railway, that the current through the Black Rock channel ran at a speed that commanded respect from every man who worked 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 combined 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 temporary scaffolds, the piles, and the caisson dams, until it consolidated into anchor ice on the riverbed and shelf ice along both banks. The shelf ice at Black Rock could reach four feet thick in a cold winter.
The ice floes that came down from Lake Erie, when the lake released what it had accumulated over the winter in the March thaw, could cover vast areas and pile up 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 thus the place where any structure placed in the river had to open to allow ships to pass. It is the story of the ironworkers, pile-driver operators, 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 force for the men who worked in it. The men who built it exist in the payroll records of the contractors who employed them, in whatever form those records survived.
The bridge itself stood for fifty years. The men who built it are not named on it. To understand why crossing the Niagara at Black Rock posed a different engineering problem from crossing any other river on the American continent at that stage of bridge-building history, one has 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 sixty-two feet across its basin. Its draining waters include those of the three upper Great Lakes—Superior, Michigan, and Huron—which pass through the St. Clair River and Lake St. Clair into the Detroit River and into the western end of Erie at Detroit.
The combined drainage area of the upper Great Lakes reaches 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 nine hundred 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 normal conditions at four to five miles per hour. In the spring flood season, when accumulated snowmelt in the upper basin pushes Lake Erie to its high-water mark and the discharge through the Niagara rises toward flood peak, surface velocity in the main channel at Black Rock reaches seven miles per hour or more. A current of seven miles per hour is not a current that 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 wooden pile-driving machine could be held without temporary supports anchored to something more solid than the sediment of the riverbed.
It is not a current in which a diver wearing a canvas suit and brass helmet could move freely along the floor of the channel while inspecting pile foundations. It is a current that moved the contractor’s temporary structures at the International Bridge again and again during construction, and it required continuous engineering and re-engineering of temporary anchoring structures, wooden cribs, guide piles, and cable tie-down systems. None of that appears in the reports of the bridge’s completion that ran in the railway trade press in 1873, because that 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 long enough to do the work those spans required. The engineer was Casimir Stanislaus Gzowski.
He was a Polish-born military officer who had come to Canada in the wake 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 through Ontario. He had built the suspension bridge at Niagara in the 1840s. He understood what river work in the Great Lakes basin required from years of standing at crossing sites and reading the difference between what the initial surveys said and what the river actually did when 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 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 to navigation when ships needed to pass, with fixed truss spans on either side of the swing bridge, stretching the line across the full width of the river. The foundations of the piers 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. Beneath 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 were glacial deposits, a compacted mixture of clay, gravel, and broken rock left by the retreating ice sheets across the Niagara Peninsula ten thousand years ago. Below those deposits, at depths varying by location, was Lockport dolomite, the same limestone rock the Niagara 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-pier, it lay thirty-five feet below the riverbed surface and sixty feet below the water surface at mean river level.
The method to reach 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 waterline to dig by hand. A structure is built in open water, then sunk onto the riverbed, and its cells are filled with broken stone, relying on the weight of the fill and the grip of the timbers 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, and designed as a rectangular grille to receive the weight of the limestone fill once the crib was placed on the riverbed. The exterior 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 riverbed gravel while the crib was being lowered into place. 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 on the river.
The carpenters who cut, assembled, and fastened the crib sections were not engineers. They were carpenters who had learned timber craft 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 lakeshore, and on the construction of the railroad lines that had been spreading across the region since the late 1840s. They understood white oak and yellow pine the way shipwrights at the Howard yard in New Albany understood them—by hand, by eye, and by the weight of experience accumulated over their working lives in reading timber before cutting it.
Their names do not appear in the engineering reports. They are in the contractors’ payroll records, which have not been found in any collection examined 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 at Black Rock, which in the spring of 1871 was running at its highest water speed. The towing was done by steam tugs operating from the port of Black Rock.
The tugs working Lake Erie and the upper Niagara River in the early 1870s were wooden side-wheel and propeller steamers of sixty to one hundred fifty tons, designed for harbor work and for towing log rafts and grain barges over short distances in the protected waters of the upper Great Lakes. Moving a timber crib weighing four hundred tons through a five-mile-per-hour current in a nine-hundred-foot channel and placing it within an acceptable margin of accuracy at its designed position on the riverbed was a task quite different from moving log 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 requirements 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 available 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 experienced delays attributed to river conditions. The reports do not specify which conditions, or in which seasons they occurred. They do not name the men aboard the tugs or the men on the crib timbers when a crib was being maneuvered into place in mid-current.
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 water adjusting a crib’s position by hand, in a current doing its best to take the entire structure downstream without them. Once released, the crib was controlled by cables stretched upstream and tied to temporary piles already driven into the riverbed above the pier site. The piles were driven using a pile-driving barge, a flat-bottomed vessel equipped with a steam hammer for driving piles.
The hammer was lifted by a steam-powered winch and then released by gravity onto the pile head. The pile-driving barge had to be held in position while driving piles. It was held by anchor cables stretched to shore anchors and to permanent piles that had been driven in advance. 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 simply a deckhand. His name does not appear in the engineering reports. He did work that required him to tighten and slacken a mooring line in coordination with the movement of the current and with verbal signals from the boat’s foreman, who was watching the pile position, the depth gauge, and the face of the river all at once against the noise of the steam engine.
The coordination required was not exceptional by the standards of what river construction work always demanded. It was the ordinary level of judgment and physical focus that every man in that work brought to every shift. None of this appears in any published account of the International Bridge that has been found. The winter of 1871 to 1872 stopped work on the river.
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 not encountered on this scale before. Anchor ice forming on the riverbed attaches itself to the foundations of temporary structures. The shelf ice accumulating 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 came to the site from inland 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 dam or support structure that the designer had estimated from incomplete historical records, and the river delivered the load in a way 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 temporary anchor piles 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 found of whether any man was on the construction platforms when the jam formed. No construction accident records for the International Bridge project are available. 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 did not survive in a form that has been systematically examined, which is the normal condition of construction accident records from the 1870s, when reporting obligations on contractors were minimal and the incentives to keep detailed injury records were not great. The ironwork for the bridge’s trusses was fabricated by the Detroit Bridge and Iron Works of Michigan.
The truss sections, diagonal and vertical members, top and bottom chord sections, and 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 toward the channel. The ironworkers who erected the trusses at Black Rock practiced 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: hanging, fitting, and riveting structural iron elements over open water and at great heights, work that required a comfort with exposure to the air and with working at elevation, a trait 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 gang. The heater managed a portable coke furnace set 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 passer caught the hot rivet tossed by the heater, caught it in a sheet-iron cone, and inserted it into the hole. The holder-on held a dolly bar against the rivet head from the back side. The riveter struck the rivet tail with a ball-peen hammer until it upset and formed a second head. A four-man gang working at a steady pace could drive about three hundred 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 winds coming off Lake Erie, which blew from the west and northwest in the fall months with enough force to shake the unbraced platforms and to cool iron rivets below working temperature faster than the heater could maintain. The ironworkers tied themselves to the platform when the wind strengthened. They worked in bitter cold because the bridge had a delivery date, the iron was ready, the piers were ready, and the railway needed to bring the crossing into service before the end of the 1873 operating season.
The swing span, the central element of the bridge, the span that rotates 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 pivot bearing, with its ends carried by end roller columns when in the closed position, had been developed on eastern railway drawbridges during the 1850s and 1860s and was well known to specialists. What was unusual about the Black Rock swing bridge was the length of the span that rotated, and the force of the current it had to resist when closed in 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 placed with a precision that determined the straightness of everything placed upon it afterward. The swing bridge in the closed position had to line up within no more than one inch with the rest bearings of the two approach spans at both ends simultaneously. This alignment depended on the pivot bearing being placed perfectly vertical and level atop the stone pier, on the pier top being at the exact elevation and position 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 upon them. The masons who laid the stones of the Black Rock piers worked in the tradition of underwater hydraulic stone construction, established in the American canals in the 1820s and developed on 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 pivot bearing surface used a precision level and a straightedge. They were not engineer’s 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 does not appear in the engineering records. He exists in the payroll ledger of the masonry contractor, if that ledger still survives. What exists in the record is that the swing bridge, when erected in the fall of 1872 and operated for the first time, aligned correctly with both approach spans simultaneously.
The pivot bearing had been placed 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 operated its first trains across it on that date. Trains crossed the Niagara River for the first time at Black Rock on a fixed structure, at a location that had been crossed only by ferries since humans began moving between what is now New York State and what is now Ontario. Before the bridge opened, everything crossing the Niagara above the falls crossed by ferry. The ferry at Black Rock had been operating 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. Rail cars were carried across the Niagara by purpose-built car ferries, large flat-bottomed vessels fitted with railway track on their decks, with loaded freight cars pushed aboard from shore facilities on both banks. A loaded freight car in the early 1870s weighed twenty to thirty tons. A ferry carrying six cars moved between 120 and 180 tons of cars and cargo in a river with a five-mile-per-hour current.
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 went with them when their work faded away. The bridge was 2,660 feet long from abutment to abutment. It stretched across the full width of the navigation channel of the upper Niagara, enabling a loaded freight train to cross from the United States to Canada without a ferry, in any weather and in any season.
The economic effects of the change were immediate. Freight that had waited at the ferry slips because of fog, 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 it benefited the railways, the shippers, and the cities whose commerce 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 laborer who climbed down from the scaffold 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 are the pier foundations that the newer bridge reused where the stonework was capable of bearing the new loads, and the river, which is 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 floes 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, mostly pleasure craft, where commercial traffic shifted 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 during two and a half years of working in it. An understanding purchased through the anchor winch and the diver’s line and the forge shop in the November winds. Paid for in the physical terms that working men pay for knowledge of the places where they work.
The men who built the International Railway Bridge across the Niagara River exist in the wage books of the contractors who employed them, in whatever form those books survived, and no one has yet searched 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 the 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 work platform 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 that no one has read yet, waiting for someone to decide it is worth the search.
