In honor of the 140th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge, I am making available for anyone to have access to my chapter on Emily Roebling from my book WOMEN OF STEEL AND STONE.
Emily Warren Roebling
She Built the Bridge
While growing up in the New York town of Cold Springs, Emily Warren could hear the side-wheelers blowing their whistles from the nearby Hudson River. Emily had no idea that some 25 years later, the great steamboat the Mary Powell would travel down the river, empty into the Upper Bay of the New York City Harbor, and sail under the Brooklyn Bridge she designed.
Born on September 23, 1843, Emily was the second-youngest of 12 children. After her father died, when Emily was 15, her older brother Gouverneur vowed to his mother that he would spend his money to advance his brothers and sisters. Gouverneur Warren, who later became a general in the US Army, paid for Emily’s tuition at the all-girls preparatory school Georgetown Visitation Convent in Washington, DC.
Emily’s studies in prep school were wide-ranging and included ancient and modern history, geography, mythology, composition, French, algebra, geometry, bookkeeping, astronomy, botany, meteorology, chemistry, and geology. She also had classes in housekeeping, domestic economy, crochet, tapestry, embroidery, watercolor, piano, and guitar—because these classes, it was assumed, would make her “marriage material.” She graduated in 1860 with the highest honors.
At the age of 20, while visiting Gouverneur, Emily attended a military ball. There, she met civil engineer Washington Roebling, an aide serving under her brother in the Civil War. It was love at first sight, and in less than a year they were married. For two years, the newlyweds lived in Cincinnati while Washington oversaw the construction of his engineer father John Roebling’s Ohio River Bridge. They also lived in Europe for two years so Washington could study bridge-construction techniques to aid his father on his new project, the Brooklyn Bridge. While in Germany, Emily gave birth to their son and only child, John A. Roebling II.
In the 1880s, a bridge that could span the East River from Brooklyn to the vastly growing Manhattan Island was becoming a necessity. The congestion of hundreds of boats crossing the river to take passengers from Brooklyn to their jobs in Manhattan had become dangerous, and was impossible during freezing or foggy conditions. After years of debate, the final approval for John Roebling’s design of the Brooklyn Bridge came in June 1869.
Just a few days later, John Roebling’s foot was accidentally crushed between a ferryboat and a piling while surveying one of the bridge tower sites. When he died two weeks later, his son Washington Roebling was appointed chief engineer, and took over the entire bridge project. Wanting to help her husband and aided by her strong math skills, Emily began to study civil engineering topics such as strength of materials, cable construction, stress analysis, and physics.
During construction, Washington contracted compression sickness, a new illness that was incapacitating bridge workers. Paralyzed and suffering from several other conditions, he was bedridden for the remaining years of the Brooklyn Bridge construction. For 11 years, Emily Roebling handled all areas of Washington’s position as chief, while also taking care of her husband and their young son.
At first, Emily’s role consisted of keeping records, answering mail, delivering messages, and checking on the construction. She also had to assure all people involved that her husband was able to complete the project in his condition, hiding the severity of his illness.
Emily grew to understand the mathematics and engineering needed to build the bridge. She knew how to speak about catenary curves, stress analysis, and cable construction—so well that many thought she was the chief engineer. In an article in the New York Times in 1883, an anonymous family friend spoke out about Emily’s involvement on the project: “As soon as Mr. Roebling [was] stricken with that peculiar fever which has since prostrated him, Mrs. Roebling applied herself to the study of engineering and she succeeded so well that in a short time she was able to assume the duties of chief engineer.”
The same 1883 article further describes the reaction of a group of men who appeared at the Roebling house expecting to consult with Mr. Roebling on the construction of new steel and iron structures: “Their surprise was great when Mrs. Roebling sat down with them, and by her knowledge of engineering, helped them out with their patterns and cleared away difficulties that had for weeks been puzzling their brains.”
Emily participated in many ceremonial duties in her husband’s place. In December 1881, Emily led the first walk on a small walkway under the actual bridge across the East River. The plank was only about five feet wide and winter winds were blowing. Stepping off from the Brooklyn tower, she was followed by Mayor James Howell of Brooklyn and Mayor William Russell Grace of New York City, with assistant engineers and reporters close behind. When they reached the New York City tower, several bottles of champagne were opened and they all drank to the health of Mrs. Roebling. When Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French diplomat who created the Suez Canal, came to town, he wanted to see the bridge. Later that evening, Emily was one of his escorts to a grand banquet in his honor.
In January 1882, when Seth Low took office as the newly elected mayor of Brooklyn, he tried to have Washington Roebling fired from the Brooklyn Bridge project. Washington hadn’t been to the site since 1872, and it seemed that his wife had taken over the job. Emily spoke to the American Society of Civil Engineers and convinced them that her husband should not be replaced. She was the first woman to ever speak to the male-dominated group. A week before the bridge’s official opening, Emily was given the honor of being the first person to cross the bridge by vehicle. In a new Victoria horse-drawn carriage driven by a coachman, Emily crossed over the bridge from Brooklyn to New York City. She took a live rooster along with her, as a symbol of victory. The workmen stopped to cheer and lift their hats as she came riding by.
At the opening ceremony on May 24, 1883, Emily and her son, John, walked across the bridge together. They started from the Brooklyn side with Mayor Low and met President Chester A. Arthur and many dignitaries coming from the New York side. Ships filled the East Bay below. Cannons blasted. Church bells rang. Everyone cheered. The country celebrated the greatest engineering feat in the history of the United States. The Brooklyn Eagle called it “the Eighth Wonder of the World—eighth in time but not in significance.”
Financier and manufacturer Abram Hewitt, a competitor of the Roeblings, gave the bridge’s opening speech. After praising the late John Roebling and Washington Roebling for their accomplishment, Hewitt gave Emily her credit: “It is thus an everlasting monument to the self-sacrificing devotion of woman, and of her capacity for that higher education from which she has been too long disbarred. The name of Mrs. Emily Warren Roebling will thus be inseparably associated with all that is admirable in human nature, and with all that is wonderful in the constructive world of art.”
After the bridge was completed, the Roeblings moved to Trenton, New Jersey, and Emily managed the construction of their mansion. Trenton newspapers wrote that a conversation piece in the Roebling home was the infamous rooster, stuffed and mounted, which had rode with Emily on that inaugural trip across the bridge. Emily had an active social life, taking on important roles in the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Huguenot Society, and other civic organizations. She traveled extensively, attending the coronation of Nicholas II in Russia, and was presented to Queen Victoria in London in 1896.
In 1899, at the age of 56, Emily graduated from the Women’s Law Class of the New York University. The commencement exercises were held at the concert hall in Madison Square Garden. Emily graduated with high honors and was chosen to read her paper, “A Wife’s Disabilities.” For the graduation class essay contest, Emily’s essay about equal rights for women won her first prize honors and $50. Later, while Emily’s professor, Isaac Franklin Russell, was praising her work, her husband Washington reportedly said, “I never heard her essay until tonight and I do not agree with one word she has said.” Surprisingly, after all the work Emily accomplished on the Brooklyn Bridge for her husband, Washington was still holding the belief that women had no legal rights.
Emily continued to be a speaker in high demand for several years. In December 1902 she became suddenly ill and died two months later, on February 28, 1903, at age 58. Washington Roebling remarried and lived another 23 years—surprising given all those years of illness while Emily took care of him and the bridge.
May 24, 1953, marked the 70th anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. The city of New York honored Emily, 50 years after her death, for her accomplishment and strength. A ceremonial plaque was dedicated to the memory of Emily Warren Roebling, “whose faith and courage helped her stricken husband.” On the bottom of the plaque, it read: back of every great work we can find the self-sacrificing devotion of a woman.
Learn More
The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, by David McCullough (Simon and Schuster, 1972)
The Roebling Legacy, by Clifford Zink (Princeton Landmark Publications LLC, 2011)
Silent Builder: Emily Warren Roebling and the Brooklyn Bridge, by Marilyn E. Weigold (Associated Faculty Press, Inc., 1984)
