The Kenosha telegraph. [volume] (Kenosha, Wis.) 1860-1888, 1882-11-10
The Highest Bridge in the World.

The Highest Bridge in the World.
George Alfred Townsend.
saw last week the highest bridge in the
world, 301 feet high. You can put the dome
of the American capitol right underneath it,
and the head of the Goddess of Liberty can
not kiss it's barney stone. The Washington
monument, which is now 275 feet high, hear,
will not rise to its road bed by whole story.
The Niagara suspension bridge is fifty feet
lower to the water beneath, and its span is
1927 feet shorter than this bridge, which
measures 2,052 feet yet weighs only three
million and half pounds, not count
ing the ties and wooden rails. Yet it cost
only $275, 900, or about eight cents per
pound mean the Kinzua viaduct bridge on
the Bradford and Pittsburg branch of the Erie
railroad, spanning gorge in the Allegheny
mountains where long detour and heavy
grades would be the alternative The Kinzua
creek rises near small mountain village called
Alton and soon becomes a deep, broad gorge,
in whose opening the autumn woods showed
for the space Of seven miles like basket Of
golden flowers and deep green leaves The
bridge is of light iron towers, like those on the
Metropolitan Elevated railroad above the park,
each made of four slender props, and the high
est of these towers are ten times trussed or
Ordered, and there are forty such supports on
each side or twenty pairs, the twenty towers
thus rising like lace or cobweb against the ze-
NTH itself, and the central towers have q
spread of One-third of the height, or 103 feet
tread at the little creek below. They are just
as light and nearly four times as high as the
Elevated railway spars at l11th street &
The Kinzua creek flows into the Allegheny
river twenty miles westward The reputation
of this bridge across which no regular train
has yet been run, is as great through western
New York as Niagara Falls, and all summer
long huge excursion trains have been run to
it, while coal company owning tract of
poor coal land along the railroad has been
charging so cents toll for carriages to go
through skirt of beech woods to the bridge,
and that exaction paid myself. The same
concern is said to demand near thousand dol
lars an acre for land commanding view of
the bridge, lest somebody might want to erect
hotel there. The gorge is very abrupt, fall
ing at an angle of near forty-tive degrees into
small, clear rill, and great Lodges of
limestone strew the slope. The abutments of
the bridge are of solid blocks of stone, near
twenty feet thick, and the structure leaps off
like lady's veil, of delicate yellow color,
blowing from mullen stalk to stalk, till the
eye grows dizzy seeing those poor slim stalks
sprout upon each other like Jacks beanstalk,
and reach to each other slender, airy arms,
and venture onward like the tendrils of Babel,
which were said to be watered by angels
tears dropped in compassion from the clouds.
The skeleton arms rising out of the gulf of
of woe, touch with their bony finger tips the
Jacobs ladder that lacks perspective in It's al
most perpendicular semblance, and when
wildcat engine darts upon the trellis and
hovers over, it looks as if crow, dazzled by
the autumnal foliage, had become enamored of
some rainbow's architecture and trembled to
ascend it