18. View High Bridge from three perspectives.
Directions: From Wilmore take High Bridge Road all the way to . . . High Bridge.
The challenge was this: to cross the Kentucky River, which flowed between two almost perfectly vertical walls of limestone rock nearly 300 feet tall and 1,000 feet apart. The canyon within, said one writer, is “extremely tortuous.” A great many engineers pronounced it an impossibility. But there was money to be made if a railroad could be built across the deep chasm.
John Roebling, who had built the famous Brooklyn Bridge, made the first attempt. In 1851 he built towers for the suspension cables. But then the Civil War derailed his efforts.
After the war, the bridge project revived. Cincinnati began to fear that rail commerce across the Ohio River would be lost to Louisville. So in 1869 Cincinnati decided to build its own railroad, called the Cincinnati Southern Railway, from the Queen City to Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The new engineers used an ingenious cantilever design. Balancing each other, arms were built out from two circular granite piers. Imagine, as the photo shows, two men sitting on chairs extending their arms, and supporting the same by grasping sticks which are butted against the chairs. There are thus two complete piers, represented in the drawing above their heads. The center girder is represented by a stick suspended or slung from the two inner hands of the men, while the anchorage provided by the counterpoise in the cantilever end piers is represented by a pile of bricks at each end. When a load is put on the central girder by a person sitting on it, the men's arms and the anchorage ropes come into tension. In short, each of the bridge’s three sections are supported from the middle on one end rather than at both ends.
When the bridge was completed in 1877, it was not only the first cantilever bridge in North America, but also the highest and longest cantilever in the world. It stood 275 feet tall and spanned 1,125 feet. Construction was completed using 3,654,280 pounds of iron at a total cost of $404,373.31. Not only was it an entirely original design and construction technique, but the entire iron superstructure was built in four months and four days in the middle of the winter. The Railroad Gazette wrote that the components went together “like a Springfield musket.” The design proved so successful that a scale model of it was placed on display at the Smithsonian Institute.
In 1879 President Rutherford B. Hayes and General William Tecumseh Sherman attended the dedication. In the crowd were sixty Shakers, “mostly females.” One report said, “They crowded around the President, General Sherman, and other dignitaries, and shook hands with them with great earnestness.” After inspecting the bridge, the president pronounced it “a marvel of engineering skill.” Then they retired to the rail cars, “where an elegant repast was served and washed down with copious libations of champagne.”
Shortly after its opening, a park was established. With picnic grounds, a restaurant, a dancing pavilion, and riding stables, it became a popular place to give important speeches. Politician William Jennings Bryan, for example, spoke there. Trainloads of people from Cincinnati, Lexington and other northern points disembarked at High Bridge for recreation, sightseeing and dancing. There were even plans to make a huge summer resort with inclines, swimming pools, and cottages.
Unusually for the time, High Bridge welcomed African Americans. One report from the Jessamine Journal condescendingly read, “There was an excursion of colored people from Danville last Saturday. They had a special train of five coaches and a string band with them. They occupied the campground and roamed amongst the hills and bushes in the morning and in the evening tripped the light fantastic toe until train time. About the only harm done was to kick all the grass off of three or four acres of ground dancing.”
Religion also came to High Bridge. It became a site of camp meetings held by Billy Sunday and Sam Jones. The Rev. DeWitt Talmage drew 8,000 to an 1897 revival. “Tall and erect, with dramatic gesture, with fire and earnestness and with ringing exclamations dotted through his zealous appeal, the noted pulpit orator was heard by a silent and deeply impressed audience.”
Not everyone was so impressed. One called the camp-meeting scene a “money-making machine.” Talmage, for example, had scored “a cool $500” for his two sermons. In 1890 another wrote, “It is a well-known fact that car-loads of people of questionable character from Cincinnati and Lexington visit the High Bridge, but usually conduct services on the hill sides and beside the still waters. The voice of the Man of God they hear not and care not. The success or failure of the meeting has always been based on the gate receipts and upon nothing else.” Another critic called one camp meeting “the Devil’s day.”
Indeed, High Bridge was earning quite the reputation. Newspaper reports described drunken frolics, suicides, knifings, and muggings. One article said, “A gentleman who went up to High Bridge Sunday says he never saw such an excursion as the one which came down from Cincinnati that day. There were ten carloads of people and enough beer to float a small-sized schooner. The sentiment of the crowd, he says, was to the effect that if they didn’t get beer in one place they would have it in another, and this is why they chartered the train and came over into Kentucky.”
In 1911 a new bridge, the one you see now, was built around the existing one. The 1876 bridge was too light to carry twentieth-century trains. Impressively, traffic continued on this vital rail link during construction. In 1929 it was double-tracked, and the massive limestone towers were torn down. This is when High Bridge got its current appearance. Legend has it that when the towers were built in 1851, a bottle of premium bourbon was sealed in each tower by the masons to commemorate the occasion. When the towers were torn down, no one admitted to finding the bottles.
As the bridge itself was improved, the park declined. Commercial trains increased, but passenger trains to High Bridge decreased and then disappeared. Prohibition also cramped High Bridge’s style. And then during World War II, the long and steep staircase from the river to the park burned.
High Bridge has experienced something of a rebirth in the last couple of decades. The Pentecostal Church of God of America began holding summer camp meetings, which brought about 600 people at a time. The trucks from High Bridge Spring Water company carry the emblem of High Bridge all over the Bluegrass region. The famous Victorian-style pavilion has been reconstructed from plans almost identical to the original. A gazebo has been rebuilt using roofing boards from the original. In fact, you can just make out the graffiti signifying that so-and-so from such-and-such made a High Bridge visit on some date. Modern playground equipment has been added. A metal cantilever overlook has been built, affording excellent views of the Dix River and the bridge. Boosters hope that eventually High Bridge will be a trail head for the High Bridge-Wilmore Rail-trail.
But it’s still dangerous. College students sometimes try to walk across, and sometimes they die. There are patrols, barbed-wire fences, and no-trespassing signs, but quite a number of thrill-seekers have fallen to their deaths. “Every time we get a call about somebody being down here, we come down here and cite them or, at the very least, run-em off,” said Jessamine County Sheriff Kevin Corman in 2007.
On an average day in 1973, eighteen trains—weighing 60,000 tons—rumbled across the bridge. Today it carries about forty trains per day. The bridge remains a vital link in the busiest north-south railroad route in the nation.
A few final bits of trivia: 1) It takes nine and a half seconds for a stone to fall from the bridge and hit the water. 2) The bridge’s 7,000 tons of steel are pinned together with 178,500 rivets.
