Wings should be pointed upstream at the following angles: 105N to 110N, in straight reaches, 100N to 102N in concave, 90N to 100N in convex, and they should be so located where practicable, that their axes prolonged would meet in the center of the channel. . Their effort resulted in one of the most mysterious and ill-fated projects on the upper river. How many bridges across the Mississippi River? In these reaches, Warren found that the river seems, as it were, lost, and indecisive which way to go and the pilot is scarcely able to find the line of deepest water even in daylight, and is unable to proceed at night with any confidence.31 The small pools behind the bars would play an important part in Warren's strategy for navigation improvement on the upper river. Second, was the idea of the Grange really his? It did so twice that year. it is destined to become the most popular region of the world, and its waters should forever be kept free and untrammelled and open to the use of every citizen within the entire navigable length, and all obstructions, whether natural or of human device, are like impediments to the prosperity of the people who till the soil of the great valley.". The Lafayette is the longest, at . The second railroad bridge to cross the Mississippi in Arkansas is Harahan Bridge, only 200 feet north of Frisco Bridge. Each day 42,000 cars drive across the. Annual Report, 1895, pp. Then, they would move to the next troublesome reach. Together, the Grange, shippers and merchants, boosters in river towns and the Windom committee persuaded Congress to authorize the 41/2-foot channel project. Locations are listed with the left bank (moving downriver) listed first. The $34 million bridge was opened to vehicle traffic in July 2007, but was officially dedicated in October 2007; the bridge replaces the old bridge which built in 1930. While still in his twenties, Donnelly had become Minnesota's lieutenant governor. The Mississippi River gave birth to most cities along its banks, and those cities did all they could to ensure that the river would nurture their growth. In December 1872, he had introduced a resolution to address the transportation problem. Nevertheless, Farquhar optimistically asked for $300,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1876.86 Disagreement over the grant and haggling over land for the project, including the purchase of Meeker Island, however, would delay the project for nearly 20 more years.87 St. Paul remained the head of navigation, and the Corps focused its efforts downstream. 67-68; Duties for the middle Mississippi stayed with the Office of Western Improvements in Cincinnati until 1873, when St. Louis became the new office for the middle river; see Dobney, River Engineers, pp. The bridge connected the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad in Illinois and the Mississippi and Missouri Railroad in Iowa. Hermann, Missouri - The CHRISTOPHER S. BOND BRIDGE is a highway bridge crossing over the Missouri River at Hermann on Route 19, between Gasconade and Montgomery County. Assistant Engineer W.A. A. Humphreys, the Chief of Engineers, ordered Brevet Major General and Major of Engineers Gouverneur K. Warren to St. Paul to begin the Corps' work on the upper Mississippi River (Figure 4). Annual Report, 1881, p. 2746. No. How many bridges in total. . Traveling eastbound from. 92-93; Kane, Rivalry, p. 312. Few boats plied the river above Galena. Support for the project came from the company's stockholders, navigation boosters and city business leaders. The National Weather Service said many of the crests across the region this season will rank in the top 10 . He questioned the value of removing boulders, believing that the steep grade and rapid current required locks and dams. Twenty-seven river miles downstream, at Hastings, they recorded a rise of about one foot and at Red Wing about one-half foot. No. More than 170 bridges (foot and railroad) span the Mississippi River on its journey from source to mouth. At this point, Minneapolitans began fighting among themselves over the project.83, Millers feared a competing water power so close to St. Anthony Falls and believed that the project might jeopardize federal funding for repair work at the falls. Amtrak's Fort Madison stationis 2 miles (3.2 km) west of the bridge. Railroads moved their freight quicker, giving their users greater flexibility in responding to market changes. However, Paxson, whom he cites, shows that the railroad completed tracks from Alton to Springfield, Illinois, in 1852, and then from Springfield to Chicago, via a roundabout route, in 1853, but did not have the line in operation until 1854. 311-12; Kane adds that during these years Meeker had sought to get the required completion date extended. 1491, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913), p. 704. St. Paul District, Corps of Engineers. Petersen, Steamboating, p. 298, also recognizes the railroad at Rock Island as the first to reach the river. But in 1862, he left the river to fight in the Civil War. It was the first bridge built. Nate [Nathan] Daly, Tracks and Trails: Incidents in the Life of a Minnesota Pioneer, (Walker, Minnesota: Cass County Pioneer, 1931), p. 18. 206-09, 209, 246; William J. Petersen, Captains and Cargoes of Early Upper Mississippi Steamboats, Wisconsin Magazine of History 13 (1929_30):227-32; Mildred Hartsough, From Canoe to Steel Barge, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1934), pp. Merrick's father bought a warehouse on the levee from which he ran a storage and transshipping business. . This map shows the completion dates at various points along the route westward from Chicago. The project would permanently reshape the river between Lock and Dam 1 (the Ford Dam) and St. Anthony Falls. By 1857, St. Paul had become a bustling port, with over 1,000 steamboat arrivals each year by some 62 to 99 boats.2, As rapidly as the number of steamboats increased, they could not keep pace with demand. . This misplaces the authority for authorizing the project with the Corps instead of Congress and makes the Corps a proactive proponent of the project, which she does not demonstrate they were. 109, pp. That destiny, they believed, was to become a commercial and industrial power as strong as the East, as well as the nation's breadbasket. While the First Battle of Porto raged on March 29, 1809, thousands of civilians attempted to flee a bayonet charge by the French imperial army by crossing the Ponte das Barcas, a pontoon bridge. Merrick lists the number or arrivals and the number of boats at St. Paul for each of these years. . 1, 62nd Cong., 3d sess., Doc. Some opponents argued that it was the federal government's responsibility to improve the river, not private interests subsidized by the government. Over the next nine years he worked his way up to become a cub pilot. The River is the Mighty Mississippi River. The count in 2011 was 60,700 vehicles per day. One dam would be blown up within 5 years of its completion and another would have to be redesigned and the completed part rebuilt. Lock and Dam 1 would have to be placed above Minnehaha Creek and have a lift of 13.3 feet. St. Lucie River Railroad Bridge Work Schedule. In February 1859, these directors reported, Snags could, in an instant, impale a steamboat or tear it apart.11 The natural river became surprisingly narrow in places. The remaining maps focused on problem reaches or detailed the river near a specific town.32 From these maps and from what he would learn about early navigation improvements, Warren began planning the 4-foot channel project. The many islands dividing the river disbursed the little water available into side channels and sloughs. The Engineers were to create a permanent, continuous navigation channel, 41/2-feet deep at low-water, for the entire river between St. Paul and the mouth of the Illinois River at Alton. MN Her father, Albert Kirchner, along with Jacob Richtman, both from Fountain City, Wisconsin, became the leading contractors for the Corps in wing dam construction. List of crossings of the Lower Mississippi River, Benjamin G. Humphreys Bridge (demolished), Gramercy Bridge (Veterans Memorial Bridge), Hale Boggs Memorial Bridge (Luling-Destrehan Bridge). Merrick, Old Times, p. 162, says that From 1852 to 1857 there were not boats enough to carry the people who were flocking into the newly-opened farmers' and lumbermans' paradise.. Just below this mantle lay a soft sandstone layer. Kane jumps to the construction of Lock and Dam 2, without discussing who made the final push for the project. Just past the crest, the channel quickly became deeper.30 Normally, the river would begin cutting through the steep slope on the back side of the bar and another bar would eventually begin forming downstream of it. Subsequent engineers reduced this number to six. Bridge will be in down position. Spring flooding on the upper Mississippi River has reached nearly historic levels this year, the result of overwhelming and quick snowmelt from Minnesota and Wisconsin. Kane, St. Anthony, p. 175, says Deprived of the navigation facilities they coveted, persuasive Minneapolitans continued to urge the federal government to act. Born in Niles, Michigan, on the St. Joseph River, Merrick watched steamboats go back and forth between South Bend, Indiana, and the town of St. Joseph on Lake Michigan.17 When Merrick was 12 years old, his family left Michigan and traveled to Rock Island, Illinois. From his experiences, Merrick learned much about the natural river. Before he could develop a plan for achieving the 4-foot channel, Warren had to learn more about the upper Mississippi River and he had to complete his survey. In response to their lobbying, Congress authorized four broad projects to improve navigation on the upper river and a number of site-specific projects in the Twin Cities metropolitan area since 1866. Locations are listed with the left bank (moving downriver) listed first. Traveling down the Mississippi to Illinois, Daly's family camped for a night a few miles below St. Paul. This act signaled a new era of internal improvements and the beginning of dramatic changes to the upper Mississippi River. This page is not available in other languages. Due to the milling operations at the falls, the cataract was in danger of deteriorating into a series of rapids. The Lou--which owed its existence to the Mississippi River--was being hindered by that . . Saint Paul, Rafting companies and steamboat interests had employed wing dams to scour the channel at troublesome bars. By 1905, the Engineers had built about 340 wing and closing dams from the Minnesota River to the southern end of the MNRRA corridor below Hastings. . Donald B. Dodd and Wynelle S. Dodd, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1790-1970. . p. 213. (29) The Paris Road Bridge (State Route 47), about 4.4 miles east of the junction with Inner Harbor Navigation As steamboats evolved and as the region's population and production grew, the river's limitations as a navigation route would become unacceptable and Midwesterners would repeatedly call for its improvement as a commercial artery. Frank Haigh Dixon, A Traffic History of the Mississippi River System, National Waterways Commission, Document No. He does not provide a location for this work and there is no mention of it in later reports, however. Playing on the desire of Minneapolis navigation boosters, they proposed building a lock and dam between the two cities to aid navigation and to secure the hydropower for themselves.71, Meeker, a territorial judge and local entrepreneur, and Morrison, a St. Anthony Falls sawmill operator, lobbied for and obtained permission from the Minnesota Territorial Legislature to build their lock and dam near Meeker Island. One measure of this was the number of times steamboats docked at the upper river's port cities. Eastbound on I-10 crossing the Mississippi River in Louisiana's capital city, Baton Rouge. As canoes and steamboats drew people to the river, roads and railroads pulled them away. At Rock Island in 1856, the Chicago and Rock Island became the first railroad to cross the Mississippi. Harold B. Schonberger, Transportation to the Seaboard: The Communication Revolution and American Foreign Policy, 1860-1900, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1971), p. 21. The flood advisory . 196-97, 199; Tweet, History of Transportation, 38-39. "Although Arkansas cars could cross the Mississippi River at Memphis beginning in 1917 rather than having to drive to the . Annual Report, 1875, p. 302. In response, farmers in the Midwest and throughout the nation joined the first national farm movement, called the Grange or Patrons of Husbandry. Portending the coming conflict with Minneapolis, St. Paul citizens criticized the project, as it would steal from them their valuable position as the head of navigation. From the Open Air platform of an Observation Car, cross the Milwaukee Road, Now Canadian Pacific, bridge that crosses the Mississippi River at La Crosse Wisconsin. Warren provided estimates for a variety of projects, in his first annual report in 1867. The highest average daily traffic (ADT) count in the entire planning area, and one of the highest in the State of Iowa, is 77,000 ADT (2000) on the I-74 bridge over the Mississippi River. Annual Report, 1908, pp. . A newly completed lock and dam and another one under construction promised to make Minneapolis the head of navigation. Between 1866 and 1869, three more railroads crossed the river to Iowa, and by 1877, thirteen railroad bridges spanned the upper river (Figure 5).40 Railroads greatly increased the countrys ability to move commodities, and, yet, railroads would provoke and inflame a shipping crisis. U.S. Congress, House, Survey of the Upper Mississippi River, Exec. Pauluntil Congress did something about the rapids below St. Anthony Falls. They had closed nearly all the side channels. The Wabasha Avenue bridge was the first to cross the Mississippi River in the city of St. Paul, built in the 1880s and replaced amid controversy in the 1990s. Maybe, at a few places, especially between St. Paul and Hastings, settlers could have waded across on some persistent bar during extremely low water. . Instead of going to St. Louis or New Orleans, a steamboat from St. Paul might unload at La Crosse or Rock Island or at other railheads, and increasingly, most river commerce became local.41, While the river had been hauling grain since the birth of Midwestern agriculture, railroads held too many advantages over the undeveloped waterways. Cook completed his survey between 1866 and 1867 and, to Meeker's surprise, recommended that a lock and dam be constructed at Meeker Island, with a 13-foot lift.79 Cook's report and lobbying by Representative Donnelly and Senator Alexander Ramsey finally convinced Congress to give the State of Minnesota a 200,000-acre land grant to finance the dam, rather than having the Corps build it. 651-293-0200 In 1876, he returned to Wisconsin to becomefittinglya railway agent. For such a large river, the Mississippi has a relatively low flow. Bridge 37-20-40 Chambers Railroad over Coast Fork of the Willamette River, Lane County, OR, closed to traffic. [and] suggested that the Congress study the problem and find a solution. Windom, Select Committee, p. 7; Schonberger, Transportation to the Seaboard, p. 29. Connected with this matter is a secret history, upon which I proceed as discreetly as may be to cast a little light. Ibid., p. 293. Edward L. Pross, A History of Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Bills, 1866-1933, Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1938, p. 44. It was named after its designer and builder, James Buchanan Eads. A bad bar could sever St. Pauls and Hastings connection with St. Louis, the Gulf of Mexico and the world.14 Normally, during the late summer or early fall, the river began falling and would enter the stage steamboat pilots and Corps engineers called low water. Annual Report, 1875, Part 2, Vol. The Engineers did not build all the works depicted in one area at the same time. During the 1850s, traffic soared. (The 9-foot channel today is based on the same benchmark.). Allied with them were sawmill operators and boom company operators William W. Eastman, John Martin, Sumner W. Farnham, James A. Lovejoy, and Joel B. Bassett. To eliminate the problem, the Engineers closed the upper end of the east channel. I could even smell the delightfully blended odor of the willows and of the creosoted marline twine with which the bundles were held together. 1491, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913), pp. . As it had learned more about the upper Mississippi River, the Corps had recognized the futility of keeping the river navigable by dredging.61 In 1874, when the Montana could not dredge due to high water, the Engineers refitted it with a pile driver and went to Pig's Eye Island, five miles below St. Paul (Figure 8). One bridge and two cables cross the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal below the junction with the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal at New Orleans. And Congress had authorized, that year, a sixth dam for the Headwaters, the one at Gull Lake. Below the island, no deep channel existed at low water. H. Doc. Alberta Kirchner Hill spent 19 summers (1898-1917) with her father's fleet as they built the dams for the government. It required the company to spend $25,000 on the project before February 1, 1871. Boats that can pass without an opening may do so, but exercise caution. Mississippi River flooding between Lacrosse and St. Paul. They would have to focus the river's current into one main channel and block off the myriad side channels. While steamboat traffic had remained strong before the Civil War, steamboats had begun losing passengers and grain to railroads. 58, Survey of Upper Mississippi River, p. 25. . The Mississippi River bridges range from 40 to 117 years in age. Interstate 29/35 or US 71 takes you over it. From this work, Warren contended that in its natural state the Mississippi River's navigation channel frequently changed and that the Corps would have to survey the river each year until they understood how it worked.29 In some reaches, Warren reported, sandbars moved in waves along the channel bottom, looking something like snowdrifts. Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long both not only commented on how confined the river became above Hastings, they rowed its width to see how few strokes they needed. He estimated that Lock and Dam 1 would cost $568,222 and that Lock and Dam 2 would cost $598,235. 2103-04; Annual Report, 1869, p. 237; Annual Report, 1901, p. 2309; Raymond H. Merritt, The Corps, the Environment, and the Upper Mississippi River Basin, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), p. 1; Merritt, Creativity, pp. So, commercial leaders in Minneapolis, supported by the State of Minnesota, sought federal support for navigation improvements in 1866. 3 Bridges cross the Mississippi River in Mississippi: Greenville,Vicksburgh, Natchez are the only 3 bridges that cross the Mississippi River in Mississippi. When the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad was completed in 1854 under the direction of Henry Farnam and his partner Joseph Sheffield, it became the first to connect the East with the Mississippi River. The MRL&M was abandoned in 1938. There are two locks.93 Minneapolis had somehow won the debate over building one or two dams. There is the city of St. Paul, and there is the city of Minneapolis. At Guttenberg, Iowa, an island split the river into two channels, one passing in front of the city and the other running along the Wisconsin side. The river passed over the closing dams when high, but for most of the year, the dams directed water into the main channel, denying flow to the river's side channels and backwaters (Figure 10). 23-25; Tweet, A History of the Rock Island District, U.S. Army, Corps of Engineers, 1866-1983, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), p. 39; William J. Petersen, Steamboating on the Upper Mississippi, (Iowa City: The State Historical Society of Iowa, 1968), pp. To prove their point, they paid the steamer Lamartine $200 to journey from St. Paul to the cataract. At several points the width of the Lower Mississippi River is greater than 1 mile. While the Minnesota legislature appointed someone else to finish Norton's term, Windom won the seat in 1871. In this way, pilots hoped to walk their boat over the bar. From the building boat, Alberta Kirchner recalled, . Thebes in 2010 Congress, however, would soon authorize new projects for the upper Mississippi River that would make this impossible. By dividing the river, islands limited the water available to the navigation channel and thereby its depth. Transportation officials in both states are studying plans that include possibly replacing the 55-year-old span. By authorizing the 41/2-foot channel project, Congress directed the Corps to remake the upper Mississippi. To further increase the water available for navigation, Congress authorized the Corps to construct six dams at the headwaters of the Mississippi, in northern Minnesota, between 1880 and 1907. Capt. After charging men under him to undertake the tributary surveys, Warren began the upper Mississippi survey from the Rock Island Rapids to Minneapolis himself. This is the general phone line at the Mississippi River Visitor Center. They needed local navigation projects, but these did little good without a navigable river downstream. In August 1870, Kelley left Minnesota by steamboat for St. Louis to secure direct trade arrangements between Minnesota and Missouri. Hundreds of wing dams and closing dams studded the rivers banks from St. Paul to St. Louis. That got me to rooting around for some of the photos I've shot of it over the years. Millers at St. Anthony Falls especially pushed for reservoirs above the falls. 309-10. Ibid., p. 243; The Select Committee recommended a depth of 5 feet at low water for St. Paul to St. Louis. Solon J. Buck, who wrote the classic study of the Grange, observed that, although avowedly nonpolitical, the phenomenal increase in the membership of the order during 1873 and 1874 awakened the liveliest interest, and sometimes apprehension, among politicians throughout the Union.45 As a result, he says, the New York Tribune, referring to the Grange, declared that within a few weeks it has menaced the political equilibrium of the most steadfast states.46 While the Grange refused to form a political party or actively participate in the established parties, its members did not.
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