Main Street Bridge

The Main Street Bridge carries Main Street over Wheeling Creek in Wheeling, West Virginia.

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The Main Street Bridge carries Main Street over Wheeling Creek in Wheeling, West Virginia.

History

The Main Street Bridge was built in 1891 and 1892 by Paige, Cary & Company. ¹ It replaced an earlier stone bridge that had failed and collapsed. ³

Construction

The construction of the new bridge quickly became a public attraction. The temporary wooden arch built to support the masonry arch was itself a major structure, with its timber alone estimated at about $9,000 and requiring roughly 250,000 feet of high-quality lumber. ¹ Some of the timbers, especially those forming the ribs of the arch, were as much as thirty-two inches thick when shaped, and iron also played a prominent role in the falsework.

The engineering work was directed by City Engineer Frank Hoge and his assistant, A. I. White, whose abilities were widely praised. ² S. Bradley of Wisconsin served as inspector, while Joseph MacMahone of Elyria, Ohio, framed the centers. His work proved so accurate that when the arch was erected, the ends required no adjustment and the center was only a fraction of an inch out of true.

Once the centering was completed, masons built the stone arch on top of it. Afterward, the temporary support had to be removed with great care so the finished arch could bear its own weight evenly. To accomplish this, workers precisely aligned heavy cap timbers on rows of supporting piles. ¹ Iron sandboxes were placed on the caps, nearly filled with sand, and topped with wooden cylinders and additional timbers that carried the false arch. When the masonry was ready to stand on its own, sliding doors in the sandboxes were opened so the sand could escape gradually and allow the arch to settle evenly along its full length.

The bridge site itself was regarded as well worth visiting. ¹ Twelve rows of piles, heavy timbers, derricks, engines, and a tramway for moving stone and lumber made the work especially impressive. Another engine had been placed on the north bank of the creek, and when operations reached full capacity, six engines were expected to be in use at the bridge site, in addition to one at the stone yard on the South Side.

That stone yard, at 29th and Eoff streets, was also busy with activity. ¹ About 25 stonecutters shaped stone for the face of the wing walls, while large quantities of backing stone for the arch stood ready for transport. The material for the wooden arch had already been cut and only needed to be assembled. Two additional derricks were also prepared at the yard, each with a mast 65 feet 6 inches high, built from two spliced 14×14-inch timbers, and booms a foot longer, measuring 12×12 inches. They were among the largest derricks Paige, Cary & Company had yet used in Wheeling and were intended to lift the heavy frames of the temporary wooden arch into place.

Skilled workers played an important role throughout the project. C. S. Olmstead, who had a national reputation for fine work, served as chief stonecutter and dimension man. ² On the south end, Mr. Hillis was foreman, and Charles Porter was chief stone-setter, while on the north end, Ed Mann served as foreman and Frank McNabb as chief stone-setter. A race developed between the two sides to see which crew would reach the center first, and after one stone was dropped on the north end, Hillis and his crew won the honor of setting the last stones.

Completion and Opening

At 2:18 p.m. on December 17, 1891, the keystone was lowered into place by a large derrick amid cheers from the crowd and the blowing of steam whistles. ^{2 3} The completion of the arch was treated as a major civic event. One speaker proudly noted that Wheeling had once possessed the longest suspension bridge in the country, then the heaviest railway bridge, and now added another distinction by claiming the largest single-span stone bridge in the nation. ²

The arch’s finish attracted widespread interest. Among those present for the laying of the last course of stone were A. H. Sanford and N. N. Neff of the maintenance of way office of the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad at Wellsville, Ohio. ² There was also rivalry over who would be first to go out on the completed arch. Mrs. Olmstead was said to have been the first woman to venture onto it, accompanying her husband the previous Sunday, while Miss Agnes Morris was the first woman to cross it after completion.

The finished bridge contained 771 stones in all. ² There were 85 courses, with each course containing from eight to ten stones. The keystone was the forty-third stone from the north. Each stone measured 1 foot 11¹³⁄₁₆ inches on the inside, and because the inside and outside arches were not segments of the same circle, the stones varied in width on the outside.

The bridge officially opened in 1892. ³

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Gallery

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Details

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Sources

1. “Stone Bridge Work.” Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, 3 Nov. 1891, p. 5.
2. “The Keystone Placed.” Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, 18 Dec. 1891, p. 5.
3. Duffy, Sean. “Placing the Keystone Over the Place of the Skull.” Archiving Wheeling, 17 Dec. 2015.