Osage River Bridge. built originally as a wood truss bridge, burned Oct. 1 1864 in the Civil War and rebuilt as an iron truss bridge. Exists to this day without the through truss over structure.
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By Pauline Missouri –
Pacific’s most written about history is its railroad heritage. As the first rail destination west of the Mississippi River, early residents in the booming rail center became constant travelers, commuting to St. Louis for work, education, or shopping and traveling to distant shores.
Mary Margaret Bleiach Vorbek took the train to St. Louis daily to attend medical college, becomig one Missouri’s early women doctors. She interned at St, Louis City Hospital while she still lived in Pacific.
John Howe took the train to Wyoming to study Shorpshire Sheep for a year. He brought a small flock home to Howe Valley farm.
Pacific Station Plaza. _____________________
Only a handful of structures exist to memorialize this heritage. The Pacific Partnership constructed the open air pavilion on South First Street on the site of the former brick railroad station – that served both the Pacific Railroad and the Frisco – to accommodate today’s train watchers. On the opposite side of South First Street, a small concrete pedestal, topped with a bronze plaque, stands at the edge of the commuter parking lot marking the location of a former turntable that enabled the engines to be rotated for the return to St. Louis on the single set of tracks, or to the five-bay roundhouse where routine engine repairs were made.
But the most visible and lasting symbol Pacific’s role in the golden age of railroading lies not in these tourist markers, or the historic steam engines that occasionally visit here, but in a series of hundreds of magnificent railroad bridges. Some still carry trains across rivers today.
For some 30 years – 1865-1897 – every wood and steel truss railroad bridge in the Union Pacific/Missouri Pacific (UP/MoPac) Railroad system – across parts of Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas – was built in the Pacific, Missouri railroad shops and carried by rail to the site and assembled. Some of these magnificent bridges carry trains to this day. Some have been converted to tourist and recreation sites. Others stand as abandoned rusted hulks.
In the early days of railroad bridge building in Missouri, when ten miles of tracks were being laid each day, timber, which was cheap and plentiful, was harvested and wooden railroad bridges were thrown up over every river, creek, canyon and ditch.
Historic Wooden Railroad Bridges, like the 113 wood truss bridges built by the Pacific Railroad in the 1850s ad 1860s: 1 Labadie Creek, 2 Warrensburg (end of the line for the Pacific Railroad in 1864; 3 Missouri River at St. Joseph, 4. unidentified,’ ________________________________________________________________________________________________________
In October 1864 General Sterling Price’s Confederate Cavalry charge into Missouri destroyed 113 wooden UP/MoPac bridges – including the magnificent 1,162 foot, four-span railroad bridge over the Osage River (pictured above, as a rebuilt steel truss bridge and still in existence). The Gasconade, Boef Creek, Big Berger, Cole Creek, and Bailey Creek, and Moselle bridges were all burned.
From downtown Pacific, citizens and refugees fleeing advancing Confederate forces could see the red glow of the Moselle railroad bridge over the Meramec River as it burned on September 30, 1864, and a day later the railroad bridge on South Denton Road at Pacific was in flames.
The financial loss to the UP/ MoPac was $159,000 ($5 Million in today’s money), listed in a report by the St. Louis Democrat newspaper. They were all quickly rebuilt.
The Osage Bridge is one of hundreds of historic railroad bridges that exist today.
On the Frisco Highline Trail, a rails to trail project that runs 36 miles between Springfield and Bolivar, Missouri, the northern half of the trail carries tourists across 16 old railroad bridges – 13 of which are the original 1870s bridges, according to Frisco Highline tourism pamphlets. The trusses for each one were constructed by the Pacific Bridge and Building works.
The first wood truss railroad bridges across the U.S. were sights to behold – Jacob’s Ladder networks of wooden posts in the triangle V pattern. Wood was inexpensive and available. Bridges could be thrown up quickly.
Beanpoles and Cornstalks = The Potomac Creek Bridge, Fredericksburg, Virginia, landed a frequent mention in history archives after President Abraham Lincoln on his visit there in May 1862, said it appeared to be “nothing but beanpoles and cornstalks.” _______________________________________________________________________________________________
In 1860, Herman Haupt supervised common Union infantrymen from the Army of the Rappahannock in harvesting two million feet of local timber to construct the Potomac Creek Bridge in just nine working days. A record of this feat is often repeated in history archives because President Abraham Lincoln, startled at its appearance on his visit there in May 1862, said it appeared to be “nothing but beanpoles and cornstalks.”
In November 1, 1855. a 760-foot wooden trestle spanning the Gasconade River collapsed under the crossing locomotive, carrying some 600 invited visitors and dignitaries, killing more than thirty. It was the first railroad excursion across Missouri and the first major deadly bridge collapse in American history.
The tragedy did not slow the laying of rail lines across the west and building ever more bridges. But it was a precarious undertaking.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were constant reports of the death of bridge builders falling from partially completed railroad bridges or being swept away in rushing water. Some bridges burned by fires set by sparks flying from the engine, encouraging some passengers to get off the train and walk across the trestle. Many wooden bridges were purposely burned, although no record of peacetime railroad vandals being charged or punished was found.
Bridge building became speedier and less expensive when the steel Howe truss came into vogue in the 1870s.
A Howe Truss bridge consisted of chords, verticals, and diagonals (vertical members are in tension and diagonal members are in compression), according to the Army Corps of Engineers Field Manual. The Howe truss was invented by William Howe (no relation to local Howe family) in 1840, and was widely used for bridges in the industrial eastern U.S. throughout the 1800s. The Howe truss was highly economical due to its ease of construction. The pieces could be designed using little but a steel square and scratch awl, and the truss framed using only an adze, auger and saw, the engineer’s manual says.
At the end of the Civil War, the UP/MoPac hired Union army captain and gunboat builder Robert M. Peck to rebuild the destroyed railroad bridges and named him superintendent of bridges and building works for the entire railroad system.
A recovered biography of Robert Mortimer Peck, relates his bridge building operation at Pacific.
At first Captain Peck made his office in Washington, Missouri but as he surveyed the system he was to oversee, he moved his headquarters to Pacific – the junction of the UP/MoPac and its southwestern branch, (the Frisco) railroads.
After eastern financier Jay Gould acquired ownership of the UP/MoPac system, Gould would make Captain Peck one of the most powerful railroad men of his day. It was reported that Peck was the highest paid employee in the UP/MoPac system.
Long narrow building above tree in the center is the UP/MoPac car shop 1870-1925.
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Within the triangle where the two railroads diverged in Pacific, Captain Peck constructed a turntable, where engines were rotated for return trips to St. Louis and Rolla. He built a five-bay roundhouse for engine repair, a machine shop, boiler shop, electrical shop, ice house, refectory (dining hall), and a series of storage supply sheds.
In Captain Peck’s bridge works at Pacific, steel bridges, replacing the former wooden truss bridges, were built, transported by rail to the crossing and placed on pilings. The bridge works alone employed over 1,000 men.
The men in the Pacific shops built the steel trusses for every bridge in the Gould system, the largest being a rectangular combination truss bridge with a span of 172 feet. The combined span of all of the bridges built under Captain Peck’s supervision was reported at 1.4 million linear feet.
Captain Peck lived in Pacific for almost 30 years, traveling in his own private rail car for distant bridge inspections. He equipped a Pierce Arrow touring car to travel on the rails f0r inspections closer to home.
He served on the City of Pacific Board of Trustees from 1877-1882. When the City adopted the Mayor-Board of Aldermen system of government, Captain Peck was the first elected mayor.
Left: undated sketch of Pacific depicts five-bay roundhouse. Right Majestic eight-chimney Pacific Station built by Robert Peck
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In 1880, he reconstructed the Pacific depot that had been burned during the Civil War, replacing the old wooden structure with a large brick edifice with walls 13 inches thick and sporting eight brick chimneys.
When he died prematurely in 1897, the Missouri Pacific Railroad sent a special train with six cars from St. Louis carrying 40 railroad executives to attend the service. His employees sent a six-foot floral arched bridge, with a break in the center, signifying the loss of the builder. Peck was buried in a small plot on the family property, adjoining what eventually became the Pacific City Cemetery.
The heart of activity in Pacific was the UP/MoPac repair shops where men from Pacific and the surrounding communities repaired engineers, rebuilt wooden box cars, made electrical switches, and built bridges.
At the end of the 1925 Great Railroad Shopmens’s Strike, the repair shops were moved out of Pacific to Sedalia and DeSoto. The repair shop building was demolished. A snippet in the local newspaper indicated that Leber and Hirth purchased the bricks from the repair shop for the Royal Theater movie show they were building at St. Louis and Third Street. Now Camila’s Restaurant.
Today devoted railroad bridge organizations maintain archives on the largest and most impressive railroad bridges still in existence that include photos, building date, and meticulously reports of the length, span, draw, and height.
Little information was found on these sites on how those bridges were originally built.
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I spent weeks researching these bridges, including: MoPac and Frisco official histories; old newspapers.com; three current web pages – MoDot’s Historic Bridges, Friends of the Rail Bridge and bridgehunter.com; Peck/Smith famiy archive; and the Meramec Valley Historical and Genealogical Society archive.
More research is needed to compile an academic record of the historic work of the railroad bridge and bulding shops here.
I love to read the stories you write about old Pacific. Thank you for this one.
Great article. I remember my grandpa talking about the roundhouse.