Global Courant 2023-04-30 09:10:16
DIXON, Ill. (AP) — Gertie Wadsworth lay in her grandmother’s arms that bright day when the sunshine dissolved distasteful memories of a long, unforgiving winter. Christan Goble detained the 3 1/2-year-old girl in a crowd of more than 200 on the bridge over the Rock River. After a procession down Galena Avenue from the Baptist Church on May 4, 1873, Rev. J. H. Pratt began baptizing parishioners in the brisk, fast current.
Then, with a sharp bang and a crescendo of screaming onlookers loaded onto the footpath in front of towering trusses, the 4-year-old bridge twisted, shattered and rolled over. Forty-six people perished, many trapped by the unforgiving grating just below the water’s surface. Along with 56 injuries, the Truesdell Bridge disaster, which occurred 150 years ago on Thursday, remains the worst vehicular disaster in U.S. history.
“It’s not like the bridge just collapsed and went straight down,” said Tom Wadsworth, 70, a retired magazine editor and expert on the disaster. “It turns over on top of these people. … As the (Chicago) Tribune said, the truss ‘overturned under its weight and trapped the damned in an iron cage by which they sank and from which there was no escape.’ ”
Wadsworth wouldn’t be telling the story if Gertie Wadsworth, his great-grandmother, hadn’t survived. According to family lore, Goble, 51, threw the toddler to her death in the river out of reach of the failing superstructure. The toddler was rescued downstream.
After the Civil War, Dixon, 101 miles west of Chicago, was a growing city bisected by the formidable Rock River, a Mississippi tributary on which, a few miles north and half a century later, a young Ronald Reagan would working as a lifeguard after the future president’s family moved to Dixon in 1920.
For decades, wooden bridges had succumbed to raging floods. Fed up in 1868, voters demanded an iron bridge. The city council selected Lucius Truesdell’s design from 14 proposals, despite the city engineer’s warnings about its lack of uniformity and strength.
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The $75,000 toll bridge opened in January 1869 to much fanfare, though—just weeks earlier—a Truesdell bridge had collapsed in Elgin. It was repaired and failed again six months later. The Truesdell design brought traffic to other Illinois cities, including Chicago.
Newspapers dubbed Dixon’s wingspan after the disaster “The Truesdell Trap” and “The Patent Wholesale Drowning Machine.”
“You could look down and see their faces. They couldn’t surface because all that iron was on them,” Wadsworth said.” It’s frightening to look down, but to look up and see daylight, to be just a foot away from the sky? ”
The location of the May 4 mob, clustered on the west walkway, helps explain why four of the five fatalities were women, along with many children and teenagers. Knightly men gave prime viewing spots on the bridge to women and girls and stepped to shore, Wadsworth said. Boys climbed on top of the rafters.
But contemporary women’s fashion may also be to blame, Wadsworth theorizes. The 1870s ushered in heavy, layered bustle at the back of floor-length dresses, supported below by a crinolette, a series of fabric-covered metal half-hoops.
“You’re not going to win Olympic swim races wearing one of these things,” Wadsworth said.
Drowning, referred to as “strangulation” in news reports, cost many. Others met an even more gruesome demise. The crossed iron in the lattice twisted like scissors, cutting into victims like 16-year-old Katie Sterling, who was so entangled it took two days to cut her free.
Several bodies were recovered miles away. Lizzie Mackey, 17, was recovered in Sterling, 14 miles downriver. The youngest victims were sisters Alphea and Lucia Hendrix, ages 6 and 4, according to Patrick Gorman, another student of the tragedy who helped raise money in 2011 for a marker with the names of the victims.
A new monument will be inaugurated on the site on Sunday 7 May.
Pratt was wracked with guilt and admitted that he held the crowd longer than it took to extol the benefits of “coming unto Jesus.” But he was a hero that day.
“He started grabbing them by the hair, by the shoulder, and by the pants,” said Wadsworth. “He knew what the river bed was like. He had walked there many times for baptisms, so he knew how far he could get and grab people and he got 10 or 15 himself.
A century and a half later, Truesdell’s victims hold it at the top of the worst vehicular bridge failures in U.S. history. The shipwreck of the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River from Ohio to West Virginia in 1967 also claimed 46 lives, but nine were injured compared to 56 in Dixon.
The horrific collapse of the sidewalks of a Kansas City hotel in 1981 resulted in 114 deaths, the most of any collapsed span in U.S. history.
In addition to the Truesdell affair, there are four railroad bridge incidents, including one in Illinois. In 1887, a trestle fell from under a train at Chatsworth, 103 miles (166 kilometers) southwest of Chicago, killing 82 passengers when cars smashed together like a telescope as they slammed into the opposite embankment.
As he had done in Elgin’s collapse, Truesdell blamed sabotage for Dixon’s failure. In a letter to a newspaper in Massachusetts, where he lived, he weakly defended himself:
“It has been almost 18 years since I started building iron bridges, and the Elgin and Dixon bridges are the only ones that have fallen, and no human life has been lost except Dixon. Can the same be said of any other plan?
