The Schuylkill and Its Crossings
ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 20, 1789, George Washington and his retinue left Frederick, Maryland, for Philadelphia. Washington traveled north along the western bank of the Schuylkill River atop a white horse, followed by a swelling procession of well-wishers. The retired American general was en route from his home in Virginia to New York City, where he would assume the presidency of the new United States. For the previous four days, Washington had been feted from Alexandria to Baltimore and from Wilmington to Chester. He would now cross the Schuylkill River and enter the nation’s former capital, greeted by crowds of cheering Americans; the jubilation would continue into the night as revelers rejoiced beneath a sky bright with fireworks.
The day’s most remarkable moment came at about noon when Washington crossed the floating bridge at Gray’s Ferry, south of Philadelphia. The bridge had become a fixture of municipal life, functioning as a gateway to America’s largest city and the chief overland connection to its southwestern hinterland. It was only fitting that the prosaic structure be made a worthy passage through which “His Excellency” (as the new president was called) would enter a city he once defended with blood and honor.
Charles Willson Peale, the great impresario, former Continental Army captain, and painter, had accordingly transformed the bridge into a marvel of republican kitsch. At each end, he erected a twenty-foot triumphal arch, festooned in laurel branches. The bridge itself he decorated with shrubs, and along one railing hung the eleven flags of the states that had so far ratified the nation’s new constitution. Draped on the other railing was a flag of the state of Pennsylvania, the very flag that had recently returned with Captain Thomas Bell from America’s first commercial voyage to India. At each end of the bridge, banners flapped in the wind, broadcasting the soaring proclamations: “Behold the Rising Empire” and “May Commerce Flourish.”1
During Washington’s inaugural festivities, Thomas Paine was in England preparing to build the new prototype of his own bridge. But he knew the Gray’s Ferry bridge well. The same sorts of floating bridges had been built during the war at Middle Ferry and at Upper Ferry, north of the city. This one was probably made from remnants of one of the war-time Middle Ferry bridges. Now, eight years after the fighting had stopped, these artifacts of war remained, little-noticed but essential conduits of trade and transport.
THE MID-ATLANTIC REGION had bridges dating far back into the colonial era. In 1697, William Penn had ordered the construction of America’s first stone-arch bridge, across Pennypack Creek, north of Philadelphia. A somewhat modified version of the seventy-three-foot bridge, now known as the Frankford Avenue Bridge, remains in use to this day. Permanent stone and timber bridges had also been built across Ridley Creek and Big Elk Creek in Maryland, and across small waterways in eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey. These bridges tended to span no more than a hundred feet, typically resting on midriver piers. For waterways of the breadth of the Schuylkill, ferries had always been preferable. Few colonists had the skills or the funds to bridge rivers three hundred to four hundred feet wide.2
There were legal barriers to surmount as well. The most formidable were posed by the charters and lease agreements colonies and municipalities used to establish complex public works. Ferries, for instance, were typically established through leases that stood for generations. In addition to granting ferry operators the right to charge tolls for their services, the leases gave them the privilege of doing so without any immediate competition. Since many colonial roads led to ferry piers, building bridges beyond the competitive reach of the ferries would have required the added cost of new roads, which was prohibitive. The result was that colonists rarely challenged ferry leases.
The arrangement was fundamental to early-American public works. Much like the charters and patents establishing some of the American colonies themselves (not to mention canals, turnpikes, bridges, and assorted other enterprises in England), these legal arrangements were designed to wed private gain to public good. By affording the ferrymen exclusive rights and revenues for the transit of goods and people across rivers, government addressed a public need at very little direct cost.
The Revolutionary War subjected these arrangements to a form of creative destruction. Faced with the prospects of British invasion, Pennsylvania’s capital could ill afford the limitations of its old ferries and began replacing them with more efficient floating bridges. Rather than confront the tangled legal matter of who actually owned the new bridges, Philadelphia city officials allowed ferry leaseholders to take charge of the bridges as war-time necessity receded. In effect, ferrymen came to own Philadelphia’s bridges and the toll revenue they generated.
In addition to their practical utility, these new bridges were safer than the other options. In early America, rivers were places of horror. In 1784, the Pennsylvania Packet reported a particularly disastrous accident on the Ashley River outside of Charleston:
A Mr. Frazier, with 72 negroes belonging to Mr. Thomas Elliot, and a negro and horse, the owner not known, and a negro boy belonging to Mr. Frazier, were crossing the river, nearly in the middle, the boat separated in two, by which 48 of Mr. Elliot’s negroes, the negro and the horse, together with Mr. Frazier’s boy, were drowned, and Mr. Frazier (the owner of the ferry) very narrowly escaped.
In the north, winter ice heightened the hazards. John Hall, an immigrant mechanic who would help Paine build his bridge, observed that what Washington’s army did in December 1776, Philadelphians did routinely, often paying with their lives. “They will pass with Boats,” Hall wrote shortly after arriving in America, “when there is A Great Quantity of Ice in the River Steering the Chasm between when it is either going up or down with the Tide and I am told they will Haul out their Boat and draw it over Sheets of Ice and then put it into the Water again.” For some the voyage was fatal: “A man lost his Wife So . . . meeting a Woman to whom he was bewailing his loss . . . Shee God Bless hir hapend to have lost hir Husband in the Same manner.” On a 1788 journey from New York to Philadelphia, the Frenchman Brissot de Warville summarized the problem well: “There is no doubt that sooner or later bridges will, wherever possible, replace these ferries, which are often dangerous. I was close to death once on one of these ferries, while crossing the Hackensack River.”3
FOR ALL THEIR obvious benefits, however, Philadelphia’s new bridges created one serious problem. Their operation and maintenance costs far exceeded those of other public works—at least in the short run. Roads, dams, and fences required little maintenance and for this reason were generally left under public control. They could be maintained by towns and localities through old systems of compulsory labor and road taxes. Depending on the scope of their property, able-bodied free men would contribute labor or funds to the maintenance of these works.
But bridges required carpenters and perhaps stonemasons—skilled tradesmen who could not always be found. Even when available, bridge builders and bridge operators faced challenges little known to proprietors of other public works. Canals and turnpikes rarely required complete reconstruction. But for bridges, floods and careening ice made investment on this scale routine. Floating bridges were particularly vulnerable, as British military engineers had discovered shortly after completing their own bridge across the Schuylkill. In October 1777, Captain John Montresor of the British Royal Engineers confided in his journal that “at 2pm the floating Bridge at Middle Ferry was carried down the Schuylkill by the N.E. Stormy High tide and rapid stream.” The bridge had been in place for less than a month.4
More permanent bridges, built across midriver piers, fared little better. Sullivan’s Bridge was built by General John Sullivan across the Schuylkill near Valley Forge in the winter of 1777–1778, on orders of George Washington. The bridge was a replacement for the floating bridge that had carried Washington’s soldiers across the river to their famous winter encampment. The new structure, Washington hoped, would withstand the trials of late-winter ice and spring floods. For its builders, the bridge would also stand as a monument to their leader and the triumphs of patriotism. Captain Thomas Anburey, a British prisoner of war who crossed the bridge in 1778, imagined that “it was the intention of the Americans that this bridge should remain as a triumphal memento, for in the centre of every arch is engraved in the wood the names of the principal generals in their country; and in the middle arch was General Washington’s with the date of the year this bridge was built.”
As it turned out, within months of its construction, the bridge began showing signs of failure. Wood rot and winter ice had seriously damaged the road deck and supporting piers. Pennsylvanians had nonetheless grown accustomed to the bridge. In the fall of 1778, the state assembly commissioned John Edwards, a Philadelphia Militia officer, to estimate costs for repair; however, by the time Edwards received his orders, Sullivan’s Bridge had been entirely destroyed by winter ice. “Was it Repaired,” Edwards told the assembly, “it [would] stand but a short time” before succumbing again to the forces of nature.5
Even when bridges were not completely swept away, they required constant maintenance. Rain, snow, ice, metal-clad wagon wheels, and horse hooves eventually turned the most robust wooden bridges into feeble, rotting hazards. General Washington himself discovered the peril in September 1787 as he returned to Mount Vernon from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. After a rainy night in Wilmington, Delaware, Washington set out for Maryland, intending to cross Big Elk Creek at the town of Head of Elk, in northeastern Maryland. On approaching the creek, Washington determined that rains would make it impossible to traverse the nearby ford. “Being anxious to get on,” he chose to cross “on an old, rotten & long disused bridge.” The results were a near national calamity. While crossing the bridge with his two horses and carriage, part of the bridge gave way. One of the horses fell fifteen feet from the bridge, while the other narrowly avoided doing so and pulling with it Washington’s carriage and baggage. Fortunately, the general himself was unharmed, but the story captivated the nation. It was reported in at least forty-six newspapers, from Georgia to Vermont.
If for most the accident was emblematic of Washington’s godlike capacity to overcome life’s perils, for some it was a reminder of the new nation’s most treacherous hazard. Even with bridges, crossing rivers was life threatening. A decade after Washington’s accident, the Gazette of the United States reported “numerous are the accidents that occur” on Philadelphia’s floating bridges. “The week before last a carriage and horses were precipitated into the water from the bridge over the lower ferry,” and the horses lost, the passengers nearly drowned. The accident was entirely owing to “the railing on these bridges, [which] either from the form of their construction, or from carelessness, affords very feeble protection.”
War-time inflation added to the problem of maintaining Philadelphia’s bridges. Ferrymen operated the former military bridges by the terms of their old ferry leases. These had fixed the tolls back in the days of the ferries. Now, with their toll income ravaged by inflation, bridge operators could rarely cover their costs, let alone maintain the bridges. Whatever benefits the old leasing system had provided for ferry operators had been eroded by the realities of the bridge business. Before long, the city of Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania found themselves faced with a failing system of public works.
The situation became so dire that in the spring of 1779, the state assembly raised toll rates. Nevertheless, inflation continued to erode leaseholders’ incomes, and margins were too slim to account for any substantial damage to the bridges. As one Pennsylvania official observed, “the toll for Crossing the bridge over the Schuylkill, from the depreciation of the money, is become so trifling, that the [leaseholder] there assures me it is with difficulty he can support his family.” He went on to warn that “should any accident happen to the Bridge it would be impossible . . . to maintain boats for any length of time at the present low rates of the ferriage.” In other words, given the depreciation of American money, current toll rates would not even be enough to sustain ferry service should a bridge fail.6
The kinds of problems Philadelphia’s bridge operators faced were not universal in the new United States. In 1786, on the eleventh anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, a group of investors introduced the Boston public to the first bridge across the Charles River. By early American standards, the bridge was a massive public work, some fifteen hundred feet in length and costing more than fifty thousand dollars. The bridge was built atop seventy-five oak piers, and at its center was a drawbridge “opened by a most ingenious machine which is moved so easily that two ten-year old boys can operate it.” The new Charles River Bridge would remain in place for decades. By 1792, it had given rise to an imitator directly linking Boston to Cambridge.7
The happy story of the Charles River Bridge was largely a function of the Charles River itself. Unlike the Schuylkill, Susquehanna, or Delaware, the Charles passed through a tidal plain that constituted most of what is now Boston’s Back Bay. By the time the river reached Charlestown, it had disgorged itself into these plains, leaving behind floodwaters and spring ice. Relative to even the Schuylkill, the Charles also has a modest watershed, a little more than 300 square miles. With its short length of about 80 meandering miles (the direct distance from the river’s mouth to its source is only about 26 miles) and a fall of only 350 feet, floodwaters and ice floes on the river were unlikely to reach the velocity they did on the Schuylkill, a 130-mile long river, with a watershed of nearly 2000 square miles and a fall of nearly 800 feet. With no substantial marshes or swamps to absorb winter and spring freshets above Philadelphia, the Schuylkill routinely overflowed its banks, carrying away much in its path.8
In addition to its natural advantages, the Charles River Bridge enjoyed a substantial financial advantage. Although the bridge was much longer and more costly than the floating Schuylkill bridges, its operators could expect something not possible on the Schuylkill. During the colonial era, as Philadelphia’s hinterland expanded to the north, west, and south, the colonial government allowed for the creation of three ferries, leaving travelers a range of options for crossing the river. For travelers crossing from Boston to Charlestown, however, there was only a single option. As a means of financing the new Harvard College, in 1640 the Massachusetts Bay Colony granted the college exclusive rights to ferry goods and people between Boston and Charlestown. That concession became college property. Virtually all traffic between Boston, Charlestown, Cambridge, and other areas to the north used the Charles River ferry. The college jealously guarded the asset, challenging an earlier bridge proposal as an intrusion on its rights to the profits from ferry traffic.
After the Revolutionary War, with no British authorities to enforce ancient charters, the efficiencies of a bridge became hard to dispute and the state granted a group of private investors a forty-year lease for the new bridge. Although the leaseholders would have to bear the costs of building and maintaining the bridge and would have to compensate Harvard College for its lost revenue, they would otherwise enjoy a complete monopoly on traffic across the Charles—at least until 1792, when the state authorized the construction of the second bridge, to Cambridge. Even with the competition, the builders of the Charles River Bridge realized handsome gains. By 1805, an investment in the original bridge had risen in value by more than 300 percent.9
Philadelphians would enjoy no such gains from the bridge business. The natural and financial circumstances were simply too challenging. But nor could they afford to ignore their failing infrastructure. The city continued to struggle with the loss of trade to Baltimore. Without some measure to improve access to Philadelphia’s markets, Baltimore would continue to prosper at its expense.