The Bismarck Bridge. Bridge over the Missouri River at Bismarck D. T. on the Northern Pacific Railroad
1882réf. 22094Unknown place: Not Published 1882. Contemporary three-quarter leather. Very good; front cover detached; spine worn; card stock pages a bit warped. Folio. An album of 62 albumen prints meas. appx. 115 x 195 mm. mounted two to a page recto and verso on thick card stock meas. appx. 345 x 273mm. Most of the photographs are dated in the negative. There is no text; the exception is a nine line printed label mounted in the center of the first page of the album identifying the bridge and its basic details. A detailed record of the construction of the bridge by F J Haynes who had recently been appointed the official photographer of the railroad. The bridge was a wooden trestle design of 1500 feet in length between four stone piers in the river. It utilized a combination Whipple truss and bowstring trusses at the landings. The two main spans saw sections of the truss assembled on land and then floated and lifted into place for assembly. Morison DAB XIII 191-192 had previously designed and built a number of bridges for the Erie Railroad under the direction of its chief engineer Octave Chanute. He was however at this time an independent contractor and this was his most sophisticated individual effort. He would go on to complete several more bridges across the northern United States amassing an astonishing record of successful crossings of most difficult environments. Haynes carefully photographed the most salient features of the multi-year construction providing a superb - possibly unique - engineering record of the construction work. OCLC does not locate any copies of this album; see the Tilden biography of Haynes Following the Frontier . who mentions Haynes' bridge photographs but provides no illustrations to match this album; absent from the North Dakota Historical Society collection. See chapter 4 in Edwards' . Early American Bridges for an excellent account of bridge engineering and material science. Not Published hardcover books
