Without Fitting, Filing or Chipping by Tom Winpenny
An illustrated History of the Phoenix Bridge Company
There is something patently heroic about
pioneering in late nineteenth and early twentieth century bridge building, and
thus the people who were part of the Phoenix Bridge story are, in many respects,
worthy of recognition. The men who originally conceptualized bridge
building in Phoenixville in the 1860s became part of the catalogue bridge
movement and thus to some extent distanced themselves from the view of a bridge
as a highly individualized work of art. Both Clarke, Reeves and Phoenix
Bridge published promotional albums featuring a variety of wrought-iron truss
bridges that could be delivered with greater haste than anyone heretofore had
imagined possible. Working closely with the parent firm, Phoenix Iron and
Steel, the bridge company practiced velocity of throughput and produced a
quality cheap bridge. Each bridge was reassembled at the plant to insure
good fit, and then disassembled and shipped to the erection site.
Ironically, these cheap bridges had a useful life that approached the better
part of a century and thus precluded a healthy replacement business. The
bridge company at Phoenixville had a good product that enjoyed an identifiable
market niche; of the thousands of bridges designed and fabricated in
Phoenixville (the total is about 4,200) a very substantial portion were wrought
iron truss railway spans.
The bridge company's status as
a wholly owned subsidiary of Phoenix Iron and Steel was both a benefit and a
burden. On the one hand the subsidiary had the support of a well-respected
innovator in rail production and structural steel- and a healthy line of
credit. On the other hand, Phoenix Bridge was intended to be a major
outlet for the parent firm's product, and this burning reality placed pressure
on the bridge company to seek contracts and a quantity of work than might
otherwise have ignored. Phoenix Bridge rarely turned a profit, but somehow
that didn't seem to matter so long as they were pushing iron and steel out the
door.
As Phoenix Bridge grew under the direction of David Reeves in
the latter part of the nineteenth century it assumed some major engineering
challenges, and with all of this came major disasters and a quantum leap in
injury and loss of life on erection sites. Is it a gross
oversimplification and the implementation of lame logic to contend that greater
and more complex tasks guaranteed these disasters?
The famous collapse of the first Quebec Bridge in 1907, Phoenix or any other
firm's quintessential public relations nightmare, has
generally been assessed as resulting from a design problem. A closer look
at the long history of the project and the many participants, however, suggests
several additional possibilities. Indeed, the chapter on the Quebec
disaster focused on a number of human and financial failings in addition to the
obvious technical problems.
The twentieth century
held out great promise for Phoenix Bridge. The firm had tapped a truly
global market by shipping its wares as far as Russia and China.
Furthermore, during the first decade it would be involved in such high-profile
projects as the Quebec and Manhattan bridges. The labor force back in
Phoenixville or on an erection site had generally been under the control of
management, and even the organization of structural steel workers and the
dynamiting episodes did not alter Phoenix's world that dramatically. The
union targeted American Bridge and was decidedly less interested in Phoenix
Bridge. Unbounded optimism on the part of David Reeves and John Sterling
Deans seems justified, but was it?
The fortunes of the firm turned downward in the
second and third decades of the twentieth century. The accident in Quebec
had obviously tarnished Phoenix's reputation- regardless of the results of any
investigation. The market for railway bridges approached saturation,
and American Bridge maintained an awesome presence. Reinforced concrete
and the revolution it fomented in bridge construction seemed ominous. A
railway industry heading into decline would pay less attention to the repair
work and maintenance that Phoenix might provide. The basic wrought-iron
truss railway bridge erected after the Civil War proved to be rust resistant and
had an extensive useful life, approaching a century. Finally, the death of
David Reeves II in 1923 brought a less dynamic fourth generation to the
fore. So it was by the 1920s Phoenix Bridge was well on its way to
becoming a shadow of its former self, increasingly the all-purpose worker in
structural steel as opposed to the heroic bridge builder.
PUBLISHED BY:
Canal History and Technology Press
National Canal
Museum
Hugh Moore Historical Park and Museums, Inc.
P.O. Box 877
Easton, PA 18044-0877
PHOTOGRAPHS AND DRAWING BY:
Courtesy, Hagley Museum and Library
WRITTEN BY:
Thomas R. Winpenny
One Alpha Drive
Elizabethtown College
Elizabethtown, PA 17022
e-mail: winpentr@etown.edu