As conference attendees enjoyed some food, wine, and German beer, Glen Sievers along with Char Blevins and others regaled us with certain stories and anecdotes from the founding of the American Schleswig-Holstein Heritage Society thirty years ago. Among the stories and history, the story of the first railway bridge across the Mississippi was told, but much of the story remained untold that evening. So, in the my best imitation and to paraphrase Paul Harvey that you may know the rest of the story.
Jefferson Davis, the future Confederate President, served as Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce and approved the construction of the bridge. However, he believed that the transcontinental railroad would be built across the South to Los Angeles. Upon discovering that the cross-country railroad was being built across the north, he immediately ordered the construction halted. Unfortunately for him and the South, his orders were ignored. He took his case to the courts, but the courts ruled against him, and the bridge was eventually completed April 22, 1856.
But before that another major Civil War character began this story. A young Lieutenant named Robert E. Lee led the team that conducted the first topographical survey of the area. Project engineers then used that survey to deem the land ideal for a bridge.
Isn’t history remarkable?
Much tension existed between the American North and the American South. For many reasons the late Antebellum and the pre-Civil War period caused much distrust and contention between the North and the South. One such point of contention was the infamous and the most poorly decided US Supreme Court case in US history. It concerned the freedom of the slave Dred Scott and it was making its way through the lower courts until that fateful Supreme Court decision in early 1857. Another was the bridge. These and others placed America upon a precipice, and its foundations were crumbling.
It wasn’t just the fight between the northern and southern railway corridors, it was a fight between the steamboats and the railroad. Roald D. Tweet, Professor Emeritus of English at Augustana College, wrote in his book, The Quad Cities: An American Mosaic, that many believed that the bridge was built for the sole purpose to impede riverboat traffic and thus favor the railroad. Two weeks after the bridge opened, the steamer Effie Afton made its famous, or was it infamous, voyage.
Traveling upstream from St. Louis, the Effie Afton began its traverse through the draw in the late evening hours. Partly through the draw, the steamer lurched to the right and collided with a span causing great damage to the boat and the bridge. But the collision knocked over a stove in the ship and ignited a fire. The fire quickly spread from the ship to the bridge, and both were extremely damaged.
The steamboats filed a lawsuit to have the bridge removed. The railroad company hired an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln who defended the railway in court. The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court. This incident now involved all three major historical figures from that period.
~ Photos of the original bridge courtesy of Putnam Museum; Rock Island District, US Corps of Engineers; and the Davenport Public Library.
It is rumored that the Effie Afton crashed into the bridge on purpose. Once the other steamboats heard about what happened, they all blew their whistles and rang their bells with joy. Oddly enough for the next sixteen years, steamboats kept regularly (on purpose?) bouncing off the piers. And even more oddly, the Davenport Democrat (the predecessor to the Quad City Times newspaper) reported on December 25, 1940 about an ice blockage that stopped barge traffic under the third iteration of the bridge in late 1890s. Once the steamboats were able to clear the ice blockage, they searched for the what impeded the ice and found the wreckage of the Effie Afton.
History is remarkable.
~ My thanks to Wikipedia, riveraction.org, davenportlibrary.com, and The National Archives for details and photos of this story.