The Great Bridge (75 page)

Years before, Edmund Roebling, youngest of old John’s sons, had been unable to get along with Ferdinand and was “kicked out,” according to Washington Roebling. “He was now adrift with too much money, became a globe-trotter, and was somewhat dissipated.” Edmund never returned to Trenton, never married, lived on in seclusion on the Upper West Side of New York.

Emily’s health began to fail about the time the new century began. It would be said later that the strain of her experiences in Brooklyn was the principal cause. Her eyes gave her trouble at first and she took to wearing dark glasses. In the fall of 1902 Roebling went into Roosevelt Hospital in New York for some intestinal surgery and in early December, in Trenton, while he was still recuperating, she had a collapse of some sort. The doctors said she had stomach ulcers and were not encouraging. He kept going back and forth to Trenton from the hospital, a torturous trip for him, to be with her for a day or two at a time.

An additional night nurse was hired in early February. He was home to stay by then and joked with her about renaming the house Roebling Hospital. Though pitifully weak, she refused to give up and announced she would go to the mineral baths at Sharon Springs, New York. But she never did. She died of cancer of the stomach on February 28, 1903, and was buried at Cold Spring. He was too weak to make the trip.

In the file of Roebling’s letters kept by his son there is an envelope marked “Undated notes, clippings, etc, found among W.A.R.’s papers after his death.” Among the items in the envelope is a much-worn paper on which Roebling had copied in pencil an epitaph Mark Twain inscribed on the grave of his daughter:

For five years after Emily’s death he lived alone with the house and servants. The wire business in this time became the biggest in the world. The demand seemed unending—for telegraph wire, baling wire, electrical wire, for wire cloth, for bridge cable wire, for the construction of the Panama Canal, for wire rope for cable roads, coal mines, ships, oil rigs, logging machinery, tramways, elevators. The Otis Elevator Company was buying nearly all its cable from the Roeblings. The sons of John A. Roebling had become millionaires many times over. Washington Roebling’s own estate would be approximately $29 million.

On fall afternoons in 1904, in Kinkora, New Jersey, a tiny village on the Delaware ten miles below Trenton, he watched the building of a new mill complex and an entire town of brick houses and broad streets that was to become known eventually as Roebling. His brothers had announced that the town was being built only out of “plain business necessity” and that there was to be nothing utopian about it. But to the surprise of very few, it turned out to be one of the best-planned industrial towns ever built in America, a model in every respect, as company towns went. In the view of many old admirers of the family, it was a fitting extension of ideas that had spurred John Roebling on at Saxonburg so many years before.

The memory of his father remained a looming presence for Roebling. Confusion over which one of them had built the Brooklyn Bridge became increasingly common as the years passed and for him a sore subject. Time was cheating him out of everything, he lamented, even his identity. When the family decided to erect a larger-than-life-size statue of the old man and the sculptor said the few photographs on hand were not suitable, Roebling agreed to pose. He sat several times, his head turned as though studying some distant horizon, a sheaf of plans on one knee. When the finished bronze was unveiled with much to-do in Trenton’s Cadwalader Park in 1908, a great many people came up to tell him how much it looked like him.

To the surprise of almost everyone, he married again, that same year. She was a widow of about his own son’s age, Mrs. Cornelia Witsell Farrow of Charleston, South Carolina. How they happened to meet, when, or how long he had been contemplating marriage are all unclear. “…these relationships are those of the heart, not governed by reason or judgment,” he had written to John. “A second marriage late in life cannot be judged by the standard of the first because its motives are usually quite different.” John and the rest of the family heartily approved of the decision once he announced it, and of Mrs. Farrow, who, it was said, helped him “take a less gloomy view of things.” The Colonel even “became at times almost jovial.”

He who had weathered everything just lived on interminably, forever “bearing up,” people said. His teeth were pulled, one by one, and in his letters to John he complained repeatedly of physical torment and in particular of excruciating pains in his jaw. He was seized with a terror of contracting tetanus and dying like his father. “And yet people say how well you look,” he wrote, “I feel like killing them.”

In April 1912 his nephew and namesake, Washington A. Roebling, III, Charles Roebling’s son, went down on the
Titanic
and the family was news again. An editor of the New York
Times
wrote to ask if he would be good enough to explain, for the historical record, the part his mother had played in helping John A. Roebling build the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling wrote back, explaining patiently that he was the one who had built the bridge, not his father, and that it was Emily, not his mother, who had been associated “for fourteen long years with the various phases of the work.”

When the income tax came along in 1913, it was as though the country was coming apart at the seams. “It means 100,000 spies to snoop into everybody’s business and affairs.” When war broke out in Europe he shuddered at the fate of mankind. “It has come to this pass, that for an extra German to live, he must kill somebody else to make room for him. We can all play at that game. It means perpetual universal war.”

And still he carried on, writing long, affectionate letters to John, taking solitary walks down West State Street. “War in the kitchen as usual,” he reported to John in August of 1916. “The cook touched the laundress’s smoothing iron. War to the Knife, peace impossible—damages 5 strands of hair, 4 aprons torn, 2 scratches. Starvation threatens!” Somebody was watering his whiskey.

His “oddities” became a favorite topic of conversation in Trenton. When he and Cornelia dined out at the homes of friends or one of his brothers, he would frequently proceed, without a word of explanation, to make himself comfortable on the nearest sofa and go fast asleep. He hated gloves and refused to wear them even in the coldest weather. He disliked automobiles intensely and refused ever to ride in one. Jigsaw puzzles became his “narcotic,” but never satisfied with those to be found in stores, which he considered much too easy, he had his specially made, from large photographs or reproductions of paintings, each puzzle with a thousand to three thousand pieces.

He wrote his correspondence on anything at hand—a scrap of cheap note paper, the back of an old invitation, some stray bit of Emily’s stationery found in a bottom drawer. His handwriting, again as perfect as copperplate, was so small that most of his aged friends were unable to read it without a magnifying glass.

When out on his walks he was known to step into a gateway or to appear suddenly fascinated by the contents of a store window if he thought he could avoid a conversation. The standard explanation locally was that the Roeblings were all a little odd that way, but the fact was that talking was often physically painful for him. Strangers were constantly stopping him on the street. Often a mother or father with a small boy in tow would ask if the boy might shake his hand and years later these same boys would remember him as “a nice, courteous old gentleman.” Among beggars and other Trenton people interested in charity he was known as a soft touch.

There seems to have never been a day of his life in all the years following the bridge when he did not know some kind of physical discomfort or outright pain. Privately, like old men everywhere, he was preoccupied with his health, as well as material possessions he no longer had any use for.

Nature remained his solace. He had planted a grove of Siberian crab apples behind the house. “Four have agreed to bloom one year,” he wrote, “and four the next year. How good they are.” He had also acquired a new companion, a rather disreputable-looking Airedale, a stray he named “Billy Sunday.” It became a common thing to see them come down the long drive as he set off on a walk, a small, fragile old gentleman in pinstripes and boater, advancing slowly, stiffly, the dog trailing at his heels. Or they would stand together in front of his tall iron gate waiting for the trolley. There was no regular stop there but the trolley stopped just the same and dog and master would climb aboard, everybody inside watching. As was widely known, Billy Sunday was the one dog in Trenton with a special pass to ride free on the trolleys. Once Roebling was seated, Billy would slip between his legs and curl up under the seat.

Ferdinand Roebling died in 1917 and Charles the year after. Karl G. Roebling, Ferdinand’s oldest son, was named head of John A. Roebling’s Sons. But three years later Karl dropped dead on a golf course. Within days it was decided that there was only one person left who could possibly take charge of the vast industrial empire.

The New York and Brooklyn papers made much of the announcement. “A little old soldier of eighty-four, Col. Washington A. Roebling, the man who built Brooklyn Bridge and the son of the man who planned it, is fighting today his last fight,” wrote the New York
World,
“is fighting to get his work done in spite of all his enemies—illness, debility, pain, loneliness, bereavement, the terrible depression of the man who has outlived his generation.”

Roebling ran the company for the next five years and the business prospered exceedingly. “I claim a small part of this as the result of my management,” he confided to his son. Others credited him with more than a small part.

He got up each morning at about seven thirty, had his breakfast, then, like the men in the mill, took the trolley to work, accompanied by his dog. His day was the full eight hours, the same as everyone. He had no secretary, preferring to handle his correspondence himself, which he wrote always in longhand. He was all but blind in one eye, almost totally deaf, and weighed perhaps 120 pounds. He looked so frail, so very old, like Lee in his final photographs, with the same snow-white beard and sunken eyes, that people wondered how in the world he could possibly manage, knowing, as most everybody did, what he had been through in his life. But the extraordinary thing is he did not simply manage. He was highly innovative, forceful, and seemed to know absolutely all there was to know about every facet of the business. He decided to change all the mills over to electric power, instead of steam, a momentous and costly move. An entirely new department for the electrolytic galvanizing of wire was set up under his direction and the contract for the cables of the Bear Mountain Bridge, over the Hudson River—among other bridges—was taken and completed during the time he was in charge.

In one interview he was asked how he was able to carry on. “Because it’s all in my head,” he answered. “…It’s my job to carry the responsibility and you can’t desert your job. You can’t slink out of life or out of the work life lays on you.”

In 1924 at the request of the Butler County Historical Association he sat down and wrote a detailed account of the early days of Saxonburg, and to a correspondent he wrote, “Long ago I ceased my endeavor to clear up the respective identities of myself and my father. Many people think I died in 1869.”

The house next door was sold and torn down. Electric street lights were installed along West State Street. “The Great White Way in Trenton has come our way,” he wrote in despair. “Every 50 ft. will be installed a huge arc lamp to light up the front of the house and keep us from sleeping.” His own downward progress he described as accelerative, like gravity.

In the spring of 1926 it was obvious to every one that he was failing rapidly. By May he was down to less than a hundred pounds. “Think not that I am improving—growing weaker daily—body racks with pain—head bowed down in sheer apathy—bones crack when rolled over—fall down when I try to stand. Please leave me alone—and in peace,” he wrote to John’s wife. But then he added a P.S.: “A surprise: for several years—ten—a night-blooming cereus stalk has been knocked about in the greenhouse. Last night it suddenly bloomed, was brought to my bedside at 10 P.M. A delicate odor filled the room—a wonderful flower—much larger than a rose. A calyx filled with snow-white petals curved outward and oval-pointed. This morning it is gone—to sleep the sleep of ages again.”

He lingered on for two more months. The only thing he had left, he said, was his brain and for that, he added, he was extremely grateful.

He died peacefully at age eighty-nine, on July 21, 1926, with his wife, son, and several others at his bedside. There is no record of any last words being said. The end came at three thirty in the afternoon.

All of the bridges built by John A. Roebling are gone now except two—the Cincinnati Bridge and an aqueduct over the Delaware built in 1848 above Port Jervis, New York, which has been converted into an automobile bridge and is the oldest suspension bridge in America. His house at Saxonburg still stands, however, as does the church he built there and a small shed in which the first reels of iron wire were stored. John A. Roebling’s Sons has since been sold to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.