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Updated: June 5, 2025
He then described what a glorious bridge this bridge would be; how it would eclipse all bridges that had ever been built; how the fleets of all nations would ride under it; how many hundred thousand square feet of wrought iron would be consumed in its construction; how many tons of Portland stone in the abutments, parapets, and supporting walls; how much timber would be buried twenty fathoms deep in the mud of the river; how many miles of paving-stone would be laid down.
Far back towards the dusty highway where the ambulances were hurrying, and close to the abutments of a massive stone bridge that crossed a tributary of the Pasig, three officers, a surgeon, and half-a-dozen soldiers were grouped about a prostrate form in the pale blue uniform, with the gold embroidery and broad stripes of a Filipino captain, but the face was ghastly white, the language ghastly Anglo-Saxon.
Nothing was left of the brilliant schemes of the historic Legislature of 1836 but a load of debt which crippled for many years the energies of the people, a few miles of embankments which the grass hastened to cover, and a few abutments which stood for years by the sides of leafy rivers, waiting for their long delaying bridges and trains.
In 1848, he constructed the famous Holyoke Dam, across the Connecticut river at Holyoke, which is over a thousand feet between the abutments, and thirty feet in height. In 1851, he became a member of the bridge building firm of Thatcher, Burt & Co., of Cleveland, whose operations in the construction of bridges were very extensive.
The difficulty was overcome by throwing an arch, or arches, across the valley, the abutments being formed by the solid rock on each side, and building the dam upon this arching and filling in below the latter down to a sufficient depth with walling.
The piers of the summer watering-places, some of them one thousand feet in length, ran out into shoal water. Against these the waves beat in fury, enveloping the abutments in clouds of white spray.
Among other things, he told them of the abutments and ancient masonry he had seen while going through some of the wildest canyons, that could not be approached in any way. This masonry, he thought, must be the remains of ancient Moorish structures which stood there before the great earthquake had shaken up and changed the surface of the country through which the Tagus flows.
That eastern portion is clearly planned for an apse or chancel of some kind. The arch that rises eastward from the last pillar is stopped half-way in its course by a cross-arch opening into the apse, and the two last groin-ribs are carried from the pillar to the abutments of the cross-arch, being obliged by this contraction of span to form the only pointed arches in the whole vaulting.
They are built upon a grand scale, and after the Italian style, with terraces, supported by strong abutments, decked with vases of plants. The grounds are ornamented with the luxuriant, lofty, and graceful trees of the tropics; these are tolerably well kept.
Their traps were in the way of being heavy, but they minded little since the dragoman was now a victim of the influence of Coleman's enthusiasm. The road wound along the base of the mountain range, sheering around the abutments in wide white curves and then circling into glens where immense trees spread their shade over it.
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