Of Curves and Chords

In casting a wide net to both pull together a non-blog bio piece on Timothy Palmer, and in searching deeper for more information on the Trussed Arch Trusses a type commonly associated with him, (not to be confused with the Burr Arch images to be found below) I came across John Trautwine’s 1834 description of the construction of a ‘987 bridge (Then the longest Railroad Bridge in the world, built just one year prior) which came to be known as The Great American Viaduct – From The Journal of the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania Vol. XIV No.2 August 1834 – A piece titled – Description of the Viaduct near Peters’ Island – and thought excerpts worthy of a share here.

The whole of Trautwine’s description is ripe with seldom recorded details, from description of the coffer dams built to construct the piers, (and the steam engine used to pump them out) to the trestles emplaced to be used as falseworks on which to re/assemble the Trusses as they were erected over the Schuylkill. To how this Double Barrel was intended for one lane to serve rail traffic and one to serve foot and wagon traffic. (Several Philly area early Railroad bridges were two lane constructions for this purpose)

The following excerpt is intriguing in that it describes and pays homage to Palmer’s nearby Permanent Bridge which still stood at the time this Description was put to paper –

Always of interest to me is the period nomenclature (in this instance a wealth of it) found in this kind of first person source material – Here Joggle is again found to be the term of choice for the opposed swellings often milled into Posts in MKP variants to receive the Braces – It being to my mind logical to use common construction era terminology in our time also.

A rare treasure trove for wooden bridge geeks (this one in particular) are deep description of construction details little found elsewhere, detailing so descriptive the author begs pardon for the tedium borne by the reader…

I for one, am most thankful to John for these very details little shared, and this glimpse through time into his world, a world almost lost to us but for yet standing examples, and in words of description such as these, from the very minds of those who have left us our wooden transportation heritage.

We have yet to discover when this bridge was lost to time.

Hometown Sons & Timber across Oceans & Rivers & Time

With this entry a Bio piece on a self-made Timber trader. And though he was only tangentially connected to the world of wooden bridges, I mean to complete the circle and paradoxically reconnect his world with ours. In the doing I mean to make comment on how the endless onslaught of time and change needn’t and shouldn’t mean every last aspect of yesterdays technologies be left to those days that have already slipped by.

The hub of the wheel we’ll spin is George B. McQuesten. I became intrigued by the mans story a few years back while working on the earliest still surviving Wooden bridge to have been built for Railroad use, built by the Boston & Maine in 1889, (see Gleanings from the Grit) and finding his firms merchant stamp on one of the Bolster Beams we were there to replace. Being familiar with the surname, curiosity had me look for a possible connection and sure enough he and I share the same hometown and the same home river. He was born in Litchfield New Hampshire in June of 1817. His family is still there, still farming their patch of the finest bottom land in the State.

George’s self-made success story began at just twelve years of age when he left Litchfield for nearby and then newly industrializing Nashua to tend lock gates on the then recently constructed canal there. He would spend the next nine years tending to and watching the canal boats and the floating commerce and trade of others, before he would himself enter the lumber trade at the still tender age of twenty one. He would for many years do business in both Nashua and Concord, both towns like his birthplace, stand on the banks of the Merrimack River. He would then in 1872 relocate the business to Boston and initially partner with another timber trader as specialist importers of Longleaf Yellow Pine. After Geo. Fogg’s passing, McQuesten & Fogg would be renamed George McQuesten & Co.

The company would for many years specialize in the in the importation of Longleaf, a species important to the boatbuilding trade, which dovetailed nicely with McQuesten importing a non-native species. The Company and in time his namesake son would regularly commission Schooners to be built by a number of area boatyards from Boston to Gloucester to Rockport Maine. They would also trade in Knees and Trunnels, items common to the Boatbuilding Trade. In the McQuesten employ were buyers in the deep south, and their sizable fleet would regularly trip down the coast to ports in Georgia, Floridia and Texas. They would in time add Doug Fir and other West Coast species to their offerings. McQuesten Lumber long held three piers in Boston diagonally across from the Charlestown Navy Yard, and a large yard and headquarters on Border Street. It survives to this day, until this past year at a facility in Billerica Mass, a property it acquired from the Boston & Maine RR in 1955. The McQuesten Company was in 1998 acquired by a Lumber conglomerate, and George’s surname happily will continue to see recognition as a division of this company in their continuing lumber-trading story.

I find the circle made complete, of a life of commerce beginning with canal boats in an emerging mill town to that of a fleet of Schooners plying Bluewater, and shipments amounting to millions of board feet annually flowing through one of the nations best known seaports to be an amazing story worth the telling.

George and his wife Theoline chose to continue to reside in their Nashua home. He lived two days into his seventy fifth year, and together with Theoline is buried at Edgewood Cemetery there in the city.

The once common sight of a wharfside Schooner unloading Timber & Lumber – Photo courtesy of San Francisco National Maritime Museum (Image A12,727nl)

Such Schooner borne forest products were commonly crossing the worlds waters well into the 1920’s, moving desirable timber species from their native regions to distant points and seaports. Eastern White Pine was shipped from ports here in Northern New England, It likewise saw shipboard travel in large quantities on The Great Lakes and The St. Lawrence Seaway and points beyond from both Michigan and Wisconsin. Western Species rounded the Cape and are found here in eastern Mill Buildings far earlier than most might expect. And as we see here in the McQuesten story, Longleaf Yellow Pine was being unloaded in ports at distance in quantities almost unfathomable.

And this brings us back to wooden bridges – Some of this timber transversing the continent was for use in the building of bridges. Species specific traits and design values demanded their use in such important constructions even when they were not indigenous to a given area. Northern grown dense ring count Eastern White Pine being the most appropriate species for bridge truss framing, saw it shipped widely for that purpose. Many if not most of hardwood dominated Ohio’s’ bridges were built using Michigan Pine, as were those built built elsewhere in the Midwest. Spruce was likewise, strength to weight ratio similarly favored and traded. Indiana Bridgewright JJ Daniels spent much of the decade of the 1880’s setting up Longleaf Plantations in Mississippi for shipment upriver to his home state.

McQuesten & Co. seemingly had a long relationship with the bridge building division of the B&M. – Their chief of Engineering and lifelong wooden bridge advocate, JP Snow (see Scarfs) specified Longleaf for the Floorbeams and the Bolsters in The Contoocook and many bridges to follow. In later years as native species became unavailable in the then largely deforested North East, McQuesten supplied timber began to appear in the Truss-work itself.

The McQuesten Merchant Stamp seen on a Doug Fir Counter Brace in the Snyder Brook Bridge – A B&M built Boxed Pony Howe dating to 1918

As this story unfolded, and the years flipped by with the change wrought by time and circumstance in just the modes of travel and shipping in this the McQuesten story, from canal Boats to Schooners to a foothold in the world of Wooden Bridges and railroading, and then how the Railroads time has since slipped by – I could not help but reflect on which and what change brought the better, and what was perhaps lost in the often assumed notion that a change in technology is always necessarily for the better, and for how this failure sometimes leads to the better and best being left behind.

That turned to thoughts on Bridgewrighting and change and the struggle to rediscover the unwritten secrets of this almost lost trade. Of how even advocates of wooden bridges see little if any difference between a traditionally joined bridge and one with simple butt cuts and parts coupled by steel fish plates. And of how few understand that camber is in many ways better formed by knowledge and proven method applied by highly trained individuals, than it is in a curved glulam form by people who will likely never see the parts their semi-skilled labor helps create, become part of a completed structure.

Trusses are designed and constructed in such ways not because that system is superior to that of traditionally joined bridges. These methods and materials are chosen by those who either do not realize there is still a group of people capable of such joined timber constructions, or because wood, and wood to wood joints (most structural engineers simply are not trained in the use of wood as a building material) are not seen as viable method, or a building material worthy of trust. This shortsightedness is something I see as rather silly, with existing examples pushing the one hundred eighty year mark still carrying traffic daily, and being that we happen to reside on a planet blessed with Trees.

Joined Timber Bridge Trusses are the time proven methodology. To my mind their superior service life, (Literally multiples in service lives over those of steel or reenforced concrete – Only exceeded by those of the also now largely abandoned Stone Arch) should have wooden truss bridges seeing a resurgence in their construction for spans between seventy and one sixty or so. My hope is that such work might again become reasonably common so that this, my Trade, might prosper and the knowledge base might continue to roll forward with time.

The Boston & Maine’s finest still standing example – The Wright’s Ca. 1906 features Encased Laminated Arches and Shear Block Joined Hackmatack Knees – The Knees Trunnels & Floorbeams in all probability supplied by McQuesten & Co. – Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress and The NPS Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record – Photo Credit Jet Lowe

Another Litchfield son made a name for himself, and is perhaps better known than his cousin George, at least his nickname is familiar to most – Leroy Napoleon “Jack” McQuesten left his mark on The Yukon, but that is another story, one that will require we sit, open a bottle and pour a shot or three…

Adulation for Bruno

In learning we had this past Fourth of July somehow missed acknowledging his 200th, and in looking for more information on the the good Mr. Pratt, we find adulation for Bruno…

I have several times here linked to full text clips of period bio-obits for historical members of the wooden bridge community. I quite like these as primary source materials, clearly they are written by close friends or associates, within weeks or months of someones passing. As such there are often found interesting nuggets of information, sometimes recorded nowhere else.

Here we learn Thomas Willis Pratt shared more than much in common, in a parallel lives sort of way, this far beyond bridges and bridge design, with others we have discussed here on these pages. Involvement in Railroading, and being often described as and thought of as an engineer, despite a lack of any degree.

We also learn he was involved in the building of Railroads and railroad bridges here in NH, and like his storied wooden bridge predecessor Timothy Palmer he also spanned the Merrimack in Newburyport. The thought that homage to his father Caleb was part of appending his name to the ‘ 44 patent was here affirmed. And somehow, we come to know he was a pamphleteer of sorts, often writing Boston papers using the “Nom de Plume” of Bruno.

Surprisingly, despite the success, even in his own lifetime of the “Pratt Truss” built then, and for decades on into the future, in a variety of materials and in many variations – The Bio suggests “ Mr. Pratt derived little or no pecuniary profit from the invention.” This leaving us to wonder why.

The author displays multiple biases, of the newer is necessarily better variety – Besmirching the name of the good Col. Long, based primarily on some assumption of an adherence of all wooden parts in an all wooden bridge, and seemingly an assumed and accepted superiority of iron over wood as a building material. He then carries on about “The advance of knowledge taught us to modify those notions of the powers of the camber, and of the need of Counters except for short distances each side of the centre of the bridge” – This sadly is to my mind, a first person contemporaneous suggestion, that then as now, design engineers were failing to seek any input from the very people they would conspire with to build their designs – Though calcs and models do suggest that but for those near mid-span, there is no need for Counters to convey loads from Panel to Panel – However, in the process of construction of wooden bridge trusses, with a number of truss types, they are useful in every panel in both the fully controlled development of, and in-service maintenance of camber.

He also (The author) then betrays his own suggested wood is inferior biases, in his description of Pratt’s April ’73 patent No. 137,482 – Though the bio, like the passing of Mr Pratt only follows the patent date by two years, we learn this all wooden truss had already been built in numbers. While most wooden trusses can be produced far far quicker than most people would today expect, I see that part of his description “Ordinarily it could be laid together and prepared for Tree-Nailing in an hour” as a bit of an exaggeration.

This Bio was written almost on the Eve of the Ashtabula Bridge Disaster, which would send shock-waves of change through the Engineering and Bridge Building communities, and I can’t help but wonder if the author perhaps tempered some of his thoughts in response.

– The following is from the Proceedings of the American Society of Civil Engineers Vol. 1 November 1873 to December 1875 –

Names & Places and Windows through Time

Recently several brief video clips, somehow out of nowhere, jumped to my attention – Simple moments in time, captured decades ago, of two bridges which formerly stood side by side, ( and both of which have been mentioned here on the weblog ) had been digitized, and uploaded to You Tube by the Contoocook Riverway Association, a 501 c3 non-profit that has seen fit to take on the restoration and maintenance, ( I’m sure donations are needed and welcome ) of the nearby Contoocook Railroad Depot.

This first one appeared to me as if almost an apparition – And this not just because of the almost ethereal effect the falling snow seen in it lends, nor the reflected glow of that which had already reached the ground – ( I’m thinking the snow-bright light might be why the shooter chose to take this expensive piece of equipment out into the weather – You have to replay the 10 secs multiple times for detail to reveal itself ) But because despite it having left us Seventy Seven long years ago, just seven years after this piece of film was shot – Through the patch of ground it sat on, and a long familiarity with the sister bridge which we see here releasing a train which passes the far portal of the Village Bridge which picture frames this passing train – I somehow know this bridge – Through research, and photographs and many months spent on-site, and with having imagined how the two bridges and their traffic might have interacted, all the while never having imagined a moving image of all this was somehow somewhere out there waiting to be seen.

Wonderings bring on wonderment, and in seeing these captured moments, I found myself again in wonder after that Bridgewright who left us this Village Bridge. Some sources cite Horace Childs as its builder, with his firm having built the Railroad Bridge which preceded this one, and also having carpentered the other still existing Long Truss in town, and I echoed these sources in an earlier entry. ( See June ’11 entry Railroading Adverts ) This Village Bridges Bridgewright turns out to have been a former apprentice of Henniker’s – H. Childs & Co.

With so many of these guys having trade appropriate monikers, and names that almost too perfectly fit their time. I kinda chuckled in a truth is somehow stranger than fiction sorta way, on how befitting the mans name is. If I were fiction name tasked with coming up with a name for a nineteenth century Bridgewright, I think just such a name, might be that of Dutton Woods.

Such a man did exist, and though the ample list of his life’s achievements is long, and plentied with long span bridges of varying truss types. Most all of these, like the glimpse we see here of this Long Truss Village Bridge, have long since left us.

Born in Henniker in 1809 to Wm. & Betsy, his mother celebrated her sons birth while paying homage to her blood relations, by sharing her surname as Dutton’s given name. After a brief stint in his father’s mill, he entered apprenticeship as a carpenter and bridgewright under the tutelage of the Childs Brothers. He would leave their employ in his 28th year. The very same year he would take a Henniker girl, Hannah Chase, as his bride. He set up shop as a going bridgewrighting concern of his own, and though his long career was peppered with employ by various area railroads, he would continue to cut highway bridges under his own name through to the end of his life’s work

A glimmer of this, and a seeming step backwards – From the 1873 Manchester “Annual Report”

In 1850 Dutton left Henniker, for several years settling in Contoocook, before then moving on to Concord, where he would live on through to the end of his time in 1884. A Henniker history suggests “In twenty five years he constructed ten thousand lineal feet of truss bridging” Just months after his death a memorial notice in Engineering News, commends that “Among his best works was the construction of a large double tracked (Double Barrel Railroad) bridge at Goff’s Falls”

The now largely lost Village of Goff’s Falls (In the last two decades gobbled up by a fast growing airport – MHT) is a part of the world I know well, having come up just down-river and over the town line – This would be the also lost double barreled Moore’s Crossing Bridge

This not his only span to bridge the Merrimack in the Queen City. From the 1847 annual report of the City of Manchester – Committee on Finance

This clip is shot from the Depot, its sister bridge no more. Shot from the same end. This one was arriving, the other, for a time, leaving.

Scarfs Exemplifying Long Term Cooperation & Friendship

Back to Jonathan Parker Snow –

Born in Concord New Hampshire, and said to have attended private academy at ”Contoocookville” The Contoocook Academy formerly stood in the Contoocook village section of Hopkinton, none so far from the Contoocook Railroad bridge (the Child’s Truss bridge which was there when he attended Academy, and the current Double Town he replaced it with – see June entry “Railroading, Adverts and Lists of What Was”) and Col. Long’s childhood home.

My initial interest in the mans work was sparked by two things, his being a lifelong proponent of wooden bridges, that and his being openly appreciative, even praiseful of the bridgewrights he worked with, and the knowledge and abilities they possessed. Particularly those of New Hampshire and B&M Bridgewright David Haselton.

The more I come to know about the man, the more I come to understand where it was that seeming sense of admiration might have come from. It is also in a growing sense of who he was that I come to find another reason for my own appreciation. With a deepening understanding of a lifelong shared interest and friendship he held with his engineering professor at Dartmouth’s Thayer School.

The Thayer School of Civil Engineering opened in 1871, the Schools namesake and benefactor, and 1807 Dartmouth alumnus Brevet Brigidier General Sylvanus Thayer, would handpick twenty four year old West Point mathematics instructor Robert Howe Fletcher to create and run the program. He would carry on as Dean for forty seven years until he reached the mandatory retirement age, and would continue to serve as lecturer and on the School’s Board of Overseers for years thereafter.

Snow would attend Dartmouth at an age slightly older than what was or is the norm, graduating in 1875, as a member of a Thayer School class of two. Fletcher would hire Snow, only a year his junior as “instructor” for the School, he would stay on for an additional two years. The 1877 Catalogue lists him as a member of the faculty and “Instructor of Surveying.” Dean Fletcher seems to have leaned heavily on Jonathan to help in the creation of instructional materials, during this period Snow wrote several treatises on Carpentry and Timber Frame Construction for this purpose. Though I am yet to corroborate this, his ability to produce these materials is suggestive of his already having deep knowledge in this subject. I spent a day recently at Dartmouth’s Rauner Special Collections Library photographing one of Snow’s handwritten books created for the Thayer School Program.

Closeup Pg 77 – Fig’s 24 & 25

Snow would leave Dartmouth in 1878 and enter the employ of the Boston Bridge Works. Interestingly, beginning not in their engineering office, but in the shop cutting Timber joinery.

Snow and Fletcher would go onto work cooperatively on many papers over the course of their long careers, this ending with their hundred page masterwork prepared for the American Society of Civil Engineers, Paper No. 1864 – A History Of The Development Of Wooden Bridges, published when both men were in their 80’s

Students of Scarf Joints (Timber Splices) might have interest in the following paper, written by Mr Fletcher in 1909 – Reproduced here in its entirety though unfortunately in type too small to read. Clicking on the article will bring you to the Digital library where you will be able to expand it in size for readability.

Gleanings from the Grit

There are almost unintentional undercurrents here on the Bridgewright Weblog. Yes I’m intrigued by those we follow, my fellow practitioners in this trade, they in its heyday, we almost entirely from a preservation perspective. They with knowledge in abundance shared by necessity, from Master to Journeyman to Apprentice. We are left to glean what we can from what we might – Most of this is to be found not on paper, but in physical example.

Photo by and courtesty of C. Hanchey

So in this entry we dip the paddle and turn briefly, to follow a parallel current in the study of wooden bridges and bridgewrighting, and through their work, the people who built them.

The only set of Shear Block Joined Long Leaf Yellow Pine Bolsters to have survived the 30's floods & tippings - At the same corner as the Historical Marker

That brings us back to an undercurrent, Railroads drove change and innovation, and though their connection with wooden bridges is all but forgotten, being that this connection held a then almost unique place in straddling the emerging worlds of corporate style big business, civil engineering and academia, it is almost no surprise that railroading’s ties to wooden bridges are well represented in the written record. Part of the other undercurrent we ride is found as we run our fingers though and sift the dirt, the stuff, the sluff – The grit still left to us for interpretation in still standing examples is there to find, despite the passing of time.

What is sometimes hard to see, is that it might just be in the dirt under our nails in which we find much of what we are looking for –

It is tool marks left in long tightly closed timber joinery that no one has gazed into in multiple lifetimes, It is scribed marking knife and awl marks and remnants of layout lines and faded numbering left to us in the cursive grease pencil handiwork of some almost forgotten carpenter, the pride with which he executed his work daily still evident in the elegance found in his handwriting. It is a shear failure, and how the woods grain reacted to it. It is an expected depth of crush created by fifteen decades of constant and massive force. It is how a needlessly neglected leak led to unnecessary failure, and how that failure effected load-paths, and how those shifting load-paths effected the through truss as a whole.

As much or more is to be gleaned in the hands on side of things, as anything we might find on the written page.

New Beginnings Marked by an End

With this entry, a return to those native New Hampshire sons who made their mark on the development of wooden bridges, this brings us to a name now little recognized as one once seen as a famous native son, and little remembered as someone who made the significant impacts he did.

Humble beginnings building towards impacts of significance. Little remembered, in large measure, because his time and the works he did in it were marked by change so huge, that huge works have been almost lost in the fabric of time. The beginnings of that change and the huge shift in the social fabric of our then young nation was itself marked by an end. An end to modes of commerce formed by canal boats and river trade, and overland trade shaped by turnpikes, and teamsters, and taverner’s. Ways of life then nearing an almost abrupt end, brought about by the building of railroads, and the ripples of change in travel and commerce they would carry into being.

As this shift was unfolding, Lebanon’s Simeon Post went off to help build both, the railroads, and a growing nation. Seemingly a commonality amongst the uncommon men drawn to bridge building innovation in his time.

His stepping stone vocation and humble hometown beginnings would last though his mid-twenties, in these formative years he is often described as having apprenticed as a “House Joiner.” He and his fellow Lebanon native bride, Parthenia Peck married there in 1830, but had moved onto opportunity in Montpelier Vermont by the time their second child, Andrew Jackson (who will closely follow on in his fathers footsteps, which we will come back to downpage) was born four years later.

We can’t really know with what is left to us, but it can’t be helped but to imagine that Simeon was a naturally gifted draftsman, and possessed something of a towering intellect and was perhaps, in some ways, both charming, and a bit of a force of personality. For somehow, with no record of a formal education but a recently completed timber-framing apprenticeship, he set up in Montpelier as a practicing architect. This move began a meteoric career, first with work under the direct supervision of the Surveyor General of Vermont, which would see young Simeon as influential in the choice of his recently adopted city as the new state capitol. This in turn would see him offered by the General’s son, his first in a long series of railroad positions, by 1836 he is now serving as Assistant to the chief Engineer for the Auburn & Syracuse RR.

By July of ’40 he would monopolize this position into one as Resident Engineer of the NY & Erie RR. He would move up through the hierarchical ranks there at the NY & E, then engaged in endless construction, from Superintendent of Transportation to Chief Engineer by the time of his leaving in March of 1853, when he would move onto the same position with the Ohio & Mississippi RR, leaving their employ just two years later as General Superintendent. In ’55 he returned to the New York City area serving both as consulting engineer with his former employer The NY & Erie, and as chief Engineer for the Long Dock Co. in its construction of the Bergen Tunnel, continuing as chief of this project until its suspension five years later for lack of funds.

It was at this time he turned his attentions and long railroad influenced study of the bridge building branch of engineering, publishing his “Treatise on the Principals of Civil Engineering as Applied to the Construction of Wooden Bridges” in ’59. He is said to have during this period “tinkered with models” and prepared his Letters Patent for an “Improvement in Iron Bridges” receiving Patent 38,910 in June 1863.

He formed the “Atlantic Bridge Works” with fellow patent holder Daniel McCallum in 1867, This company would go onto build “hundreds” of Post Patent Trusses, most of these for railroads, both partners having deep roots in that community. The following year Atlantic dissolved, and Simeon formed a bridge building concern with his son called “SS & AJ Post, Civil Engineers and Bridge Builders” Andrew would that year patent both details for built up Iron Posts and a “Combination Truss” wood & iron variation of his fathers truss, No. 81,817

Bell Ford Covered Bridge - A Post Combination Wood & Iron Patent Truss - Photo provided courtesy of Tony Dillon

Their firm contracted Watson Manufacturing Company to fabricate its cast and wrought iron parts. AJ would later partner with this firm and become its chief Engineer. Building SS Post Patent Trusses would become Watson’s primary business for a full decade. At its height employing some 200 men at its plant and foundry in Paterson NJ, and another six to seven hundred divided up among multiple crews building bridges at sites across the nation.

A 19th C Stereoscopic view of an Unhoused Post Combination Truss Bridge - Colorado Central Railroad

Other well known and geographically dispersed bridge building concerns such as Boomer Brothers of St. Louis & Chicago (see prior entry Sister Bridge) would be granted right to build the patent. Some, such as Cleveland’s McNairy Claflen & Co. (company principles thought to be among former RR’ing associates of Simeon’s) would go on to specialize in this Truss Type.

Henry Claflen even filing an associated patent No. 47,395 for Top Chord Splices for the “Combination” versions their firm and foundry tooled up for and specialized in.

A Bell Ford Top Chord Panel Point

The last existing Post Combination Truss was lost just five years ago, the 1868 Bell Ford Covered Bridge was built by McNairy Claflen. I was part of a team which dismantled it after its collapse, and cataloged its parts for storage and a hoped for future rebuilding. It stood in Seymour IN, a town at one time served by, and which served as a north south / east west hub for Mr. Posts former employer, the O & Miss RR.

A Bell Ford Bottom Chord Panel Point

Thousands of Post Truss spans formerly bridged the nations waterways serving both highways and railroads. Single spans over modest streams and long multiple span versions bridging wide nationally known rivers. Only three all-iron examples still exist.

In March of ’70 Simeon returned to railroading, appointed chief engineer of the Northern Pacific RR, but would only some months later be stricken by a “Paralysis”. He passed quietly in his Jersey City home 29 June 1872, while at the height of his own personal success, a success also shared by his namesake Truss.