This elegant structure is thrown across the Schuylkill, on the site once
occupied by an airy and graceful wooden erection, for years the pride of
our city, and celebrated as being the longest bridge of a single arch in
the known world. The boldness of the architect in thus spanning a river
three hundred and fifty feet wide, was the theme of universal
admiration. Few will forget Fanny Kemble’s poetic comparison, when she
said the bridge looked like a white scarf flung across the water. The
destruction of this favorite fabric, by fire, in the fall of 1838, was
regarded as an irreparable loss.
The conflagration presented a grand picture. The flames were first seen
towards the western entrance of the bridge, and in a very few minutes
the whole fabric was a mass of fire. The wind was down the stream, and
catching the flames as they broke from the flooring of the bridge, it
swept them far away under, until a fiery cataract, reaching from shore
to shore, seemed pouring horizontally down the river. By this time
spectators began to throng around, and before the bridge fell, thousands
lined the adjacent shores and covered the side of the overhanging hill,
looking down on the scene below, as from the seats in an amphitheatre.
This splendid sight continued for some time, the gazers looking on in a
rapt silence, until suddenly a low murmur, followed by an involuntary
shiver, ran through the crowd, as the bridge, with a graceful curtesy,
descended a few feet, hesitated, and then, with a gentle, swan-like
motion, sank, like a dream, down on the waters. But the moment the
fabric touched the wave, a simmering, hissing sound was heard, while ten
thousand sparkles shot up into the air and sailed away to leeward. The
fire still, however, burned fiercely in the upper works, which had not
reached the water; while volumes of smoke rolled down the river,
blending the earth, the wave, and the sky into one dark, indistinct
mass, so that the burning timbers, occasionally detached from the
bridge, and borne along by the current, seemed, almost without the aid
of fancy, to be lurid stars floating through the firmament. The moon,
which was just rising, and which occasionally burst through the dense
veil of smoke, appeared almost side by side with these wild meteors, and
added to the illusion. The effect was picturesque; at times even
sublime.
More than two years elapsed before the bridge was replaced by the
present elegant structure, whose airiness and grace more than reconcile
us to the loss of its predecessor.
This new fabric is, we believe, the finest, if not the only, specimen of
its kind in the United States. The plan is simple. Two square towers of
solid granite, thirty-two feet in height, are built on either abutment.
Over each of these towers, on iron rollers, pass five wire cables, each
cable being composed of two hundred and sixty strands, each strand being
an eighth or an inch thick. The length of each cable is six hundred and
fifty feet. These cables are secured, on each shore, in pits, distant
from the towers one hundred feet, and continuing under ground fifty feet
further, to a point where they are securely fastened at the depth of
thirty feet. These pits are built over so as to exclude the rain, but
not the air; and the cables, being painted, are thus preserved from
rust. The cables, in stretching from tower to tower, form a curve, the
lowest point of which is at the centre of the bridge. The causeway is of
wood, and hangs, by smaller wire cables, from these larger ones. The
width of the bridge is twenty-seven feet, and its length, from abutment
to abutment, three hundred and forty-three feet. The strength of the
bridge has been tested by a weight of seventy tons. The structure is
painted white throughout, and has already won the name of the most
graceful bridge in the country.
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[Illustration:
Painted by Sir T. Lawrence, Eng’d by H.S. Sadd, N.Y.
_The Proffered Kiss._
_Engraved Expressly for Graham’s Magazine._]
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