First Mississippi River Bridge
The two communities of Minneapolis and St. Anthony shared the resources of the Falls. Both towns grew quickly and developed a number of industries at the falls. The earliest waterpowered facilities were sawmills; flour mills soon followed. For many years river crossing between the communities was via a rope-drawn ferry, by foot when the river surface was frozen, or on floating log booms that often filled the channel.
Although he ran one such ferry, as early as 1852, Steele anticipated a need for a permanent bridge to span the river near present-day Hennepin Avenue. He formed the Mississippi Bridge Company to build a 620-foot (189 m)-long, 17-foot (5 m) wide suspension bridge, linking Minneapolis to Nicollet Island and hired Thomas Griffith to design it. The bridge was opened on 23 January 1855 with a large celebration. As a private enterprise, tolls were levied: five cents per pedestrian, twenty-five cents per horse-drawn wagon, and two cents for swine and sheep.
Steele had previously (in 1853) built a shorter bridge to cross the channel from Nicollet Island to St. Anthony; together these created the first permanent bridge to span the Mississippi at any point along its length. They linked the two cities, which legally merged in 1872, taking the name Minneapolis: a compound of the Dakota Indian word, "minne" or "mni" for "water", and the Greek "polis" for city.
Read more about this topic: Franklin Steele
Famous quotes containing the words mississippi, river and/or bridge:
“Listen, my friend, I’ve just come back from Mississippi and over there when you talk about the West Bank they think you mean Arkansas.”
—Patrick Buchanan (b. 1938)
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O, my soul.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)