Hats Off to the Tradesmen

Their work still stands.

Hats Off to the Tradesmen

I walked alone along the bank of the river, my boots leaving clear prints in the sandy mud. I stopped for a moment, leaned on my walking stick, and gazed across the riffled surface of the greenish water. The summer sun shimmered and reflected back into my eyes from a calmer, backwater pool beside the dirt path. Huge white cumulus clouds billowed above the green ridges in an otherwise perfectly blue sky, and birds clamored in huge gatherings in the trees that line the riverbank. There were corn and alfalfa fields at my back, and across the river, more farms.

This particular path leads to a still-preserved segment of the old Pennsylvania Canal. At one time, heavy draft horses drew loaded canal boats through the still canal waters all along this river, when it was the only economical means to transport goods into and out of the area. But to get to the section of the canal from this spot, I had to pass beneath the gigantic arches of an old stone arch railroad bridge.

You'd never know by looking at this place that the canal once transported goods all the way from Lake Erie to Pittsburgh, and from from there to Philadelphia and beyond. And all of it came through this spot, right here. Begun in 1797, the heyday of the canal system was about 1840, and had faded to complete disuse by about 1900, replaced entirely by the railroads.

From flat-bottomed boats on the shallow river to barges on the canal, to freight cars on the railroad. Today, the property of man rides far less often on the railroad, crossing the entire continent in trucks instead. The span of time to get from there to here, more than two hundred years.

Standing before me and spanning the river is a stone arch bridge. Built in 1905, the bridge is still used multiple times daily by rail traffic. Practically maintenance-free, it's well over a hundred years old and in good overall condition. The highway I travel each day to go to work passes over a pair of bridges that span just a creek, and traffic has been diverted from four lanes to just two. That's because both bridges are currently being replaced, one at a time, due to deterioration. Each of them are in the neighborhood of forty years old.

I once asked a friend who's an engineer, why this has happened. He shook his head sadly, and gave me the short version.

“There was a time,” he said, “when men weren't ashamed to build things with their hands. A man was proud to be a tradesman, and masonry was a proud profession. You might wonder how a bridge like that stone arch bridge could ever be built. It looks like the rocks would fall before you'd ever get them cemented in place. But the stones support themselves. Big superstructures are put in place, in the shape of the arch to be constructed. The men who built the superstructures, that was primarily what they did. Building a bridge like that one was labor-intensive, and today, if you did want to construct one like it, you wouldn't be able to find enough willing craftsmen. Because the trades are no longer respected, no longer a proud thing to have.”

“There were crews of masons who did nothing but cut the stones to shape. It was handwork then. They didn't have equipment powered by electricity and big diesel engines. But it didn't matter. They found a way to get it done.”

“Imagine,” he continued, “before the railroad came along, the canals were cut by hand. No bulldozers, no skid shovels, no track hoes. Just men with picks, shovels and horse-drawn carts. They loosened the ground with horse-dawn plows, and it was back-breaking work. No doubt people died doing that work. But you know,” he grinned, “if they went to the tavern to get a beer after a couple of weeks of non-stop work, you wouldn't want to pick a fight with one of 'em. They had to have been hard men. Remember, those were times long before even the telephone, and if a man in your family went to work on the canal and he never came back, you wouldn't have been terribly surprised. If you got sick, as often as not, that was it. You lived hard and not for very long.”

So today my eyes don't simply behold the bridge that spans the river. I study it. It is truly amazing, you know. I found myself wishing I could have been here, even as a mason's helper, seeing it rise from the bedrock. A haze drifted over my mind, and I began to imagine what it must have been like. Soon it was a full-fledged daydream.

Men were working and moving, all around me. This was no construction site like I'd ever seen before. Equipment, forms and beams were brought right to the construction by rail. A single pair of rails had been laid all the way to the bridge-site from the south.

The road I'd walked on to get to the river was now just a narrow mud road with patches of shale that had been run down by steel-rimmed wagon wheels. Teams of horses brought the work crews from town, where most of the masons and engineers had been put up in the local hotel. Local men were hired as laborers, and during the time the bridge would be completed, it was a boom-time for local bars and cafes.

It seemed at first like everyone was dressed alike, but I just wasn't used to seeing this kind of clothing. Almost everybody wore suspenders, most of the trousers were hand-made and some of the laborers didn't wear shoes. And everybody had some kind of a hat with a brim.

Wagons were continuously bringing in rough stone from the local limestone quarry. The wagon would be guided by a big fellow to a spot in the field that you would swear would never produce crops again, it was so compacted by wagon traffic. Then a crew would offload the stones by hand and begin to pick through them. Chunks of the size needed that day would be marked or rolled off to the side, the others would be ranked close together for later use.

Make no mistake. This was hard, hard work, and the result still stands. Freight trains still cross the river over that bridge. One wonders, when will it need replaced?

Offhand, I’d say, when hell freezes over.

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