At first glance he seemed a rather silent but pleasant person, relaxed, unassuming, attractively modest. Indeed, apart from his name, there appeared, on first meeting, to be nothing much out of the ordinary about him. He was not impressive, the way his father had been. His father, on top of everything else, looked like a great man.
But in this they were quite the same: they had an absolute, total confidence in their ability to do the job at hand.
Washington Roebling was a great believer in heredity and the part it played in determining one’s “composition.” He would write of what he called “a peculiarity of the Roebling mind,” which he saw as a fixed determination to do things as one thought they ought to be done, no other way, asking little advice of anybody, and generally refusing it when offered. This “overweening self-reliance” was a family streak, he held, something much more serious than ordinary “Dutch” stubbornness and as much a handicap as a virtue. But he also wrote, “It might be argued if a man inherits everything he deserves no credit for it. That would be so in a life of universal monotony, but with each generation in turn totally different conditions and environments arise. These have to be met by the new individual who must develop his powers to adapt himself to them; to overcome them and use them as his tools.”
As a “new individual,” starting, say, from about age six on, he had neither grown up in an ancient walled city nor filled himself with philosophy nor dreamed of future liberation in some distant utopia. He had grown up an American and perhaps the most obvious, important difference between Washington Roebling and his famous father was just that. Furthermore, he had been through those two most characteristic and influential experiences for American men of his generation: he had spent his boyhood in the rural backwaters, where the frontier was recent history and there were still comparable privations; and he had been through the war. Unlike his father he had been both an American farm boy and a soldier and those two experiences had played a profound part in determining his own “composition,” as he called it.
And there was something else: he had grown up with John A. Roebling as his father.
Washington Roebling’s passport, dated May 27, 1867, and signed by William H. Seward, offers the following physical description. “Age, 30 years; Stature, 5 feet 9 inches; Forehead, broad; Eyes, light grey; Nose, short; Mouth, small; Chin, square; Hair, light; Complexion, fair.”
A passport issued some years later has him an inch taller and according to some accounts his eyes were blue, but in any case a more memorable picture was put down in one of the wartime letters of a Union Army colonel named Theodore Lyman, who served on the staff of General George Meade.
Roebling is a character…He is a light-haired, blue-eyed man, with a countenance as if all the world were an empty show. He stoops a good deal, when riding has the stirrups so long that the tips of his toes can just touch them; and, as he wears no boots, the bottoms of his pantaloons are always torn and ragged. He goes poking about in the most dangerous places, looking for the position of the enemy, and always with an air of entire indifference. His conversation is curt and not garnished, with polite turnings.
What’s that redoubt doing there? cries General Meade. “Don’t know; didn’t put it there,” replies the laconic one.
Contrary to general belief, he had not been named for George Washington. It would be said that as an idealistic young immigrant John Roebling “reverently chose” for his first-born son “the name that had most inspired him in the history of the young republic.” But the son himself told a different story. He had been named for Washington Gill from Richmond, Virginia, a surveyor his father had hired to help lay the railroad line over the Allegheny Mountain. “They were sitting on top of the mountain when the news of my arrival came,” Roebling wrote, “and Mr. Gill begged that I be named after him. The Gill was dropped but Washington I have struggled with ever since.”
He was born on May 26, 1837. If ever he considered his father’s absence at the time a slight or a prophecy in any sense, he never said so. Nor was he troubled by the absence of clergy at his christening. “I was…baptized by the postmaster, Mr. Shilly, there being no preacher as yet—have received no ill effects therefrom.” When he was six, his father would describe him as a “well-built, sturdy, quiet boy.”
Across the street, catty-corner from the house, was the church his father had built, and beyond that were orchards planted by the first settlers, great stretches of open farmland, but still, also, big stands of virgin forest—black oak in the main—and woods of smaller second growth that were full of game. “As late as 1845 a black bear walked down Main Street,” he wrote, adding, “he got away.”
The social life was decidedly German and Monongahela rye was considered the staff of life. For entertainment, people put on plays or small parties and dances, at home. “Bernigau played the violin; Wickenhagen the violincello; Neher the cornet; Roebling the flute and clavier.”
The native Pennsylvanians called them Latin farmers, meaning they knew more of Latin than farming. There had never been a dearth of interesting conversation, Roebling would recall. Next door lived Ferdinand Baehr, a wool carder from Mühlhausen, who had a splendid library and a brother-in-law named Eisenhardt who had been at Waterloo, in the regiment that held the Château Hougoumont against the French attack. Baehr took a great interest in Washington Roebling and the little boy became a daily visitor, listening to Eisenhardt tell over and over how the French bullets had rattled like hail against big oak doors that never failed.
A year or so before the Civil War, when he was living in Pittsburgh, working with his father on the Allegheny River Bridge, Roebling had gone back to Saxonburg to visit his grandmother Herting. His father had refused to go. For Washington it had been a terribly disappointing experience and he wished with all his heart he too had never returned. As a child, he said, it had seemed the finest place in the world.
Being the “Roebling boy” I had the entree to all houses, to wonder over the many heirlooms the people had brought over—curious old clocks, old Bibles and books, quaint pictures, novel utensils of copper, brass or china, long German pipes. My grandmother Herting had a wooden travelling-box with a carved top inside of which a picture of the battle of Navarino was glued, showing the burning of the Turkish fleet; that was a treat. A similar picture depicted Marshal Blücher driving the French over the Katzbach.
There were farms not very distant where the old Indian trail to Venango could be plainly seen. Delawares, Shawnees, Senecas, and Muncies had used it for nobody knew how long. George Washington himself had traveled it by foot. An old blacksmith named Glover, the first known settler in Butler County, was still alive then and a subject of immense respect. He had been at Valley Forge. And probably the most famous person in the whole county was an old woman over in Buffalo township whose story was part of the pioneer folklore Washington Roebling had grown up with. Her name was Massy Harbison. In 1792 she had been captured by Senecas and Muncies, who murdered two of her children before her eyes, then set off on a terrifying forced march through the forest, driving her and her one remaining child, an infant, before them. But she had managed to escape and made an unbelievable run for her life, traveling for four days through the wilderness, still carrying her baby. When she reached Pittsburgh, scarcely half alive, it was recorded on good authority that more than 150 thorns were extracted from her feet.
Saxonburg was on the route of the annual flight of the passenger pigeons to Canada every spring, and the sight of them filling the sky was something he would talk about all his life. Fearful thunderstorms shook the little town, and once, in 1843, everyone poured out into the night to see the great comet, “with its head at the foot of Main Street and tail above the church.”
Roebling was twelve when his mother, who was again pregnant, moved the family to Trenton, traveling without her husband, who was “tied down” to work in the East. The boy was put into the Trenton Academy, along with his brother Ferdinand, and seems to have gotten by well enough for the
next five years. He took up the violin, developed an interest in astronomy and mineralogy, and decided on an engineering career, although it seems unlikely that he ever had much choice in the matter.
Once, in the winter of 1853, he went up to New York with his father. Work on the Niagara Bridge had closed down until spring and his father was seeing to other business. They went over to Brooklyn for some unknown reason and in the process spent several miserable hours on board an icebound ferry. For a man of his father’s temperament, it was doubtless an infuriating experience, to be so at the mercy of such elementary forces. But as a result, the story goes, John A. Roebling, his son at his side, “then and there saw a bridge in his mind’s eye.”
At seventeen Washington Roebling was sent off to Troy to get his training, his father having concluded Troy was the place for him.
The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy was a new kind of school, the first in America established for the specific purpose of providing an education in “Theoretical and Practical Science.” It had been started some twenty years before by Stephen Van Rensselaer, the Hudson River patroon and politician, who held that the “aspiring energies of youth” had for too long been “chained down to a kind of literary bondage,” and who made Amos Eaton, the distinguished geologist, its first head. By the time Washington Roebling came along, it was a small assembly of brick buildings set on a steep hill overlooking Troy and the Hudson River and one of the very few institutions in the country offering courses in civil engineering. There were just over a hundred students in all and the prescribed attire was a dark-green cloth cap and a velvet-collared frock coat to match.
There is a picture of Roebling taken at Troy. He was nineteen at the time, a very handsome, sturdy-looking youth, with his father’s jaw and a rather intense stare. He himself thought he looked altogether too boyish and tried without success to grow a mustache.
“In regard to the mustache you covet so,” wrote his sister Laura from Trenton, “I can only recommend something which will favor the growth of the desired article, namely, shave every day, and apply some Guano on the desired place and no doubt soon a luxuriant crop will spring up.”
The work itself was extremely difficult. Once in a letter to Charles Swan he mentioned swimming the Hudson, but otherwise he seems to have done little else but study, which is not surprising, considering what was expected of him at home and what was required by the institution. His senior thesis was to be on “Design for a Suspension Aqueduct,” but in three years’ time he had also to master nearly a hundred different courses, including, among others, Analytical Geometry of Three Dimensions, Differential and Integral Calculus, Calculus of Variations, Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis, Determinative Mineralogy, Higher Geodesy (the mathematical science of the size and shape of the earth), Logical and Rhetorical Criticism, French Composition and Literature, Orthographic and Spherical Projections, Acoustics, Optics, Thermotics, Geology of Mining, Paleontology, Rational Mechanics of Solids and Fluids, Spherical Astronomy, Kinematics (the study of motion exclusive of the influences of mass and force), Machine Design, Hydraulic Motors, Steam Engines, Stability of Structures, Engineering and Architectural Design and Construction, and Intellectual and Ethical Philosophy.
A century later, D. B. Steinman, a noted bridgebuilder and professor of civil engineering, would write, “Under such a curriculum the average college boy of today would be left reeling and staggering. In that earlier era, before colleges embarked upon mass production, engineering education was a real test and training, an intensive intellectual discipline and professional equipment for a most exacting life work. Only the ablest and the most ambitious could stand the pace and survive the ordeal.”
Roebling, however, would take a different view when he came to appraise the system long afterward. He saw no virtue whatever in what he called “that terrible treadmill of forcing an avalanche of figures and facts into young brains not qualified to assimilate them as yet.” “I am still busy,” he said, “trying to forget the heterogeneous mass of unusable knowledge that I could only memorize, not really digest.” The strain was terrific. Of the sixty-five students who started out in his class, only twelve finished. And among those who did not finish there had been some rather severe breakdowns, it appears, and one suicide.
The suicide was Roebling’s first real experience with tragedy. It is not entirely clear what happened, but in the late fall of 1856, during his final year at Troy, a classmate killed himself and apparently it was because of his feelings for Roebling. All there is of the incident in the written record is a letter Roebling wrote to Emily during the war, and two desperate notes written by the unfortunate young man shortly before he did away with himself, all three of which Emily saved.
“My candle is certainly bewitched,” he wrote to her from Virginia, nearly ten years after the incident, “every five minutes it goes out, there must be something in the wick, unless it be the spirit of some just man made perfect, come to torment me while I am writing to my love. Are any of your old beaus dead? If I wasn’t out of practice with spiritual writing I would soon find out.
“There is only one friend whose spirit I want to communicate with,” he continued, “you have his picture with mine; he committed suicide because he loved me and I didn’t sufficiently reciprocate his affection; I advised him to find someone like you for instance, but he always said no woman had sense enough to understand his love.”
And that is all Roebling seems to have written on the subject, just one small paragraph in his neat copperplate hand that leaps out of the last page of a love letter written late at night in Virginia, after he had been “building bridges and swearing all day.”
The first of the other two letters was in German and written on the evening of October 5, 1856, which was apparently after Roebling had rejected his friend’s proposal for some sort of formally declared bond between them. The writer pleads for Roebling to understand the nature of his affections and his misery, and asked Roebling to “make allowances.” “Our temperaments are so very different, that something which appears only natural to me may perhaps appear incomprehensible or ridiculous to you.” And again he begged Roebling to declare his own affections for him, and for him alone. The letter is signed “Your friend,” but the name has been erased, whether by Roebling or the young man who wrote it is not known. Roebling was still quite unwilling to agree to what was being asked of him.
The next letter was written on Thanksgiving Day. There is only a copy of the first part of it, written from memory by Roebling later that day. The young man, it seems, had taken to using chloroform as a narcotic and explained to Roebling how to bring him out of an overdose, should Roebling find him in that condition (“…pour cold water over my head, then breath air from your mouth into my lungs and if there is no success get Dr. Bonetecon and tell him to cup me in the neck; as ultima ratio you may try Electro-Magnetism….”). Then he wrote, “If your efforts should prove fruitless do this: Keep of my things whatever you like, it is all yours!”
Roebling noted on the letter, “At this moment he suddenly staggered in, asking why I did not stay with him. Accordingly I went to his room—he took the letter afterwards so that I had no opportunity to copy it. The rest was merely an inventory of his property, together with some parting words of love.”
Just when the young man died, or how, remains unknown. But the whole pitiful affair was a dreadful experience for Roebling, an unpleasant memory ever after. It may also account in large measure for the bitter feelings he later expressed about the prescribed regimen at Rensselaer. Even the few who did graduate, he wrote, “left the school as mental wrecks,” which was an exaggeration clearly, his own case being the most obvious evidence to the contrary.
It was the summer of 1857, the time of the great panic, the year his father first proposed an East River bridge, the same year William Kingsley moved to Brooklyn, and the same summer Henry Murphy sailed for the Netherlands, that Roebling finished college and returned home to Trenton, his boyhoo
d over.
His first job was in the mill, and it seems he was actually running things there, entirely on his own, almost immediately, his father and Charles Swan both being away on other business. Then in the spring of 1858, he was on his way to Pittsburgh to work with his father on the Allegheny River Bridge. His salary was eight hundred dollars a year.
Pittsburgh was home for the next two years and he developed a great attachment to the place, writing his family that he regretted the day when he would have to leave. “Pittsburgh is getting along quite smart now,” he informed Charles Swan. “I doubt if there is a lazy man in it, your humble servant perhaps excepted.” Already he had ten times as many friends as in Trenton, he said. He kept a small notebook that he titled “Lists of Persons I have been introduced to in Pittsburgh, Pa.” and scattered among the names of contractors and ironmongers were a Miss McClure, Miss Carr, Miss Mendenhall, Miss Blake, and a Miss Molly Smith of Chambersburg.
He lived in a boardinghouse on Penn Street, worked hard, played chess with the other boarders, went to the opera, argued with his father about invariably starting the work day at six thirty in the morning, recovered from a series of severe abdominal attacks (the cure was his father’s vile concoction of raw eggs, warm water, and turpentine), and he wrote home at length, describing with spirit and humor, as his father never would, what was happening in the world about him, apart from work.
He had been to hear Edward Everett at a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the taking of Fort Duquesne. He described the iron buildings going up everywhere (“There is a perfect mania here for improvements…”), a storm that nearly took part of the bridge away, and “dark, cloudy, smoky afternoons, when the sun doesn’t shine and the gas is lit at 4¼.” One letter he began this way:
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