"Early Wooden Bridges and First Suspension Bridge"
Smithfield United Church of Christ has always been a bridge builder in a city of bridges – connecting people of diverse backgrounds, interests, points of view, and faith journeys. It is most appropriate that one of the historic windows in the sanctuary honors the early bridges crossing the three rivers, making neighbors of communities otherwise separated.
Like many of his German predecessors who settled in the Pittsburgh area, John August Roebling (1806-69) emigrated to the United States seeking political and religious freedom. While employed as an engineer on the Pennsylvania Canal he developed the first wire rope (at 1 1/4 inch in diameter) available in his adopted country, a replacement for the hemp ropes (at 9 inches in diameter) used on the inclines that pulled canal barges up the sides of mountains.
Roebling adapted the wire rope for use in two Pittsburgh suspension bridges: the Allegheny Aqueduct Bridge, built over the Allegheny River in 1845, and the Smithfield Street Bridge in 1846, which replaced the first bridge to cross the Monongahela at that location – a wooden covered bridge built in 1818 and known as the Monongahela Bridge. The covered bridge was destroyed by the great Pittsburgh fire in April 1845, and the 1846 steel bridge was replaced in 1883 with the existing "lenticular truss style" bridge, the oldest surviving such bridge in the United States.
The existing truss style Smithfield Bridge.
You can learn most everything you ever wanted to know about Pittsburgh's bridges in Bob Regan's The Bridges of Pittsburgh (2006), from which these details were derived, and Stephan Lorant's Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City.
See also:
– through you and me!
10/22/07
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