Born in Prussia in 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars, John Augustus Roebling grew up in an environment of political unrest and limited economic mobility. In 1831, after studying architecture and engineering in Berlin, he immigrated to the United States, where he would become a successful entrepreneur and one of the country’s most creative and prolific engineers.
Roebling became famous for designing suspension bridges using an innovative wire rope that he produced himself. In 1867, after building landmark bridges at Pittsburgh, Niagara and Cincinnati, he turned his attention to the most ambitious civil engineering project of the century: a suspension bridge spanning New York’s East River. Because the towers anchoring the bridge would rest on the bedrock of the ocean floor, the project required radical new construction techniques involving caissons — large underwater chambers — filled with compressed air.
During its planning phase, the Brooklyn Bridge was referred to as “The New York and Brooklyn Bridge,” “The East River Bridge” or simply “The Great Bridge.” This Currier & Ives lithograph was released in 1877, while the bridge was still under construction.
In 1869, before construction had begun, Roebling died of tetanus following a foot injury. His eldest son, Washington Roebling, dedicated the next fourteen years of his life to fulfilling his father’s vision for the Great Bridge. Washington was a Civil War veteran and a graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. During the war, he had been honored for heroic service at Gettysburg, where he played a key role in securing Little Round Top, an important strategic position that proved crucial to the Union victory.
Construction on the bridge began in 1870 under Washington Roebling’s leadership. He soon contracted decompression sickness — known to scuba divers today as “the bends”— as a result of working in a compressed-air environment. The malady was little understood at the time, and several men who worked on the bridge died from it. Roebling was virtually housebound for the duration of the project, but he continued to provide detailed instructions, through his wife Emily, to the engineers at the work site.
The Brooklyn Bridge opened on May 24, 1883. With a main span stretching 1,596 feet, it would be the world’s longest suspension bridge until 1903, when it was surpassed by the neighboring Williamsburg Bridge.
Washington Roebling suffered from chronic after-effects of decompression sickness, but managed to lead a long and productive life. He served as president of the family business, John A. Roebling’s Sons, until shortly before his death in 1926 at the age of 89.
The Brooklyn Bridge currently ranks 73rd among the world’s longest suspension bridges. Although it is only the sixth longest bridge in New York City — behind the Verrazano Narrows, George Washington, Bronx Whitestone, Throgs Neck and Williamsburg Bridges — the Brooklyn Bridge remains one of the city’s most beloved landmarks, a favorite of both locals and tourists.
“Great-Grandpa Built the Brooklyn Bridge…”
It took more than 13 years to build the Brooklyn Bridge, the world’s largest suspension bridge at the time. But how many men did it take to complete it? And who were they?
The Brooklyn Bridge was typical of other early, large projects built largely by hand and by immigrant labor. Though the projects received public funding, much of the work was done by private contractors, so there is no convenient set of records available to identify all the men who might have drawn a paycheck digging the caissons down to the bedrock or spinning the wire rope to make the giant cables that would hang between the towers over the East River. At least not yet.
Gary Feuerstein says he established his Brooklyn Bridge Website because “the bridge represents one of our greatest artistic and engineering achievements. It was the moon landing of its time … [and I] was disappointed that there was not a good source of information and photos on the Internet, so I started posting.”
The site features names of names and short biographies about bridge workmen, a list Gary originally populated from sources such as David McCullough’s The Great Bridge and the program from the 1883 opening ceremonies. “There were no systematic records kept of the bridge workers, not even the fatalities,” he says. “What records there are suggest that there may have been about 1,000 men employed during the course of the construction. As of now, I have posted about 120 names, so there is still a long way to go.”
About half of those names have been posted by family members of people looking for or offering information about a relative who supposedly worked on the bridge. As long as the postings don’t violate prior, established facts, Gary lets them stand, and visitors to the site help sort things out. “Fortunately, some of the families have helped clarify and refine the information.” You can see what he means in the entry for Edward Wellman Serrell.
If family lore says your great-grandpa worked on the Brooklyn Bridge but you can’t find his name on Gary’s website, don’t give up just yet. In the 1880 Federal Census, which is available on Ancestry.com, several New York residents reported that they were working on the Brooklyn Bridge, East River Bridge or “big bridge,” while many others identified their occupation simply as “bridge builder.”
In the 1880 Federal Census, Francis Brennan, a 50-year-old Irish immigrant and father of three, reported his occupation as “working on Brooklyn Bridge.” Brennan’s name does not yet appear in the list of workers on Gary Feuerstein’s Brooklyn Bridge Website.
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