By 1840, Samuel McCarty had had enough. He was finished with building bridges over the Fox River in Aurora. Or so he thought.
McCarty had come from New York in 1834 with his brother Joseph and had chosen a spot to build his sawmill. It was such a nice spot that many more people began to settle there as well, on both sides of the river, and they needed lumber to build their homes. Within two years, McCarty had built a wooden bridge to haul his boards across the river.
In less than a year, a flood took out his bridge. So McCarty rebuilt it in 1838, this time getting $2,000 in pledges from his new neighbors.
Sadly, heavy spring rains came again in 1840, and the rising waters of the Fox carried McCarty’s second bridge downstream.
He was exasperated. He gave up on bridge building and let a ferry operator handle getting people and goods across the river.
That is, until 1843, when he tired of the inconvenience. He enlisted some friends, started a subscription drive, and by 1845 two wooden bridges were erected that would last until the next big flood in 1857.
In the 19th Century, the river was king, and wooden bridges didn’t have much chance of survival against spring floods.
Most of the original street bridges over the Fox between St. Charles and Aurora were first built in the 1830s and made of wood. Some of them, including several in Aurora, were covered wooden bridges.
They were dark and on the spooky side, wrote Robert Barclay in a 1968 Aurora Beacon News article.
“And how they sounded,” he said. “Heavy hooves . . . even at a walk, set up quite a rumble.”
Some of the earliest wooden bridges were made of connecting floating logs. “These would sag in the water as heavy loads passed over,” said John B. Nolan of Springfield, retired now from his job as engineer for the state, where he worked in the bridge office for 31 years. For the past five years, he has been documenting historic bridges throughout Illinois.
Railroad bridges (that’s another story) had an influence on the construction of highway bridges. The railroads needed reliable structures that wouldn’t wash out or catch fire from the sparks of the locomotives. So engineers began to design iron trestle bridges, and these types of bridges began to appear on the Fox in the 1860s.
“The iron was soft in those days,” Nolan said. “It was a combination of wrought iron, which was good for tension, and cast iron, which was good for compression. But steel replaced the iron bridges starting about 1880 or so.”
Aurora replaced two of its wooden bridges with iron bridges in 1868. Accounts of Geneva’s iron bridges vary. An old Aurora Beacon News says a cast iron “wagon bridge” was built in 1869. The Geneva Republican says an iron bridge built at State Street in Geneva in the late 1800s had seven arches.
St. Charles built an iron bridge in 1874. However, after 30 years of use, the St. Charles iron bridge collapsed in a terrifying accident in 1902, when a streetcar was crossing it. Luckily, the collapse was a slow, easy drop resulting in no deaths, slight injuries to passengers and little damage to the streetcar.
Shortly after the turn of the century, nearly all the bridges up and down the river were replaced with stone or concrete bridges. Batavia built a stone bridge with six arches. It survived floods, but an ice jam damaged it. It was rebuilt, though, and lasted until 1911 when a concrete bridge was erected.
A photo taken around 1909 in Geneva shows a temporary bridge that was useyd for traffic while a new concrete bridge, in the background, was being constructed.
“This (temporary bridge) was made of nothing more than big drainage tiles covered with gravel,” said Mary Wheeler in a 1976 Beacon News article. Wheeler’s father, John Wheeler, owned a construction company that was building the new bridge.
“One night we had flash flood warnings,” Mary Wheeler related. “I was just a child, but I remember that my father filled the horse-drawn wagons with stones and anything heavy and put them on the temporary bridge all night. My father said, `By morning it may all be gone.’ But the next day the bridge was still there.”
John Wheeler built the new bridge by putting up 2-by-12-foot iron sheets to which structural steel supports were added. Concrete was poured on top of this structure. But in those days, many of the concrete bridges were not built in this manner.
“The earliest type of concrete bridges were earth-filled arches,” Nolan said. “They would build an arch ring and fill the void between the arch and the ring with earth.”
For example, the Benton Street bridge in Aurora, rebuilt in 1994-95, had been an earth-filled concrete bridge.
The concrete bridges on the Fox, most of them built just after the turn of the century, have had remarkable staying power. The Illinois Department of Transportation monitors them. Most have had repairs and decks (the top highway part) replaced. But only recently, nearly 100 years after their construction, are most of them finally having to be replaced.
Aurora, nicknamed “City of Bridges,” according to local museum director John Jaros, has recently replaced three of its four downtown bridges: the Galena, Benton and New York Street bridges. Costs to do this work varied from about $1.5 million to $3 million per bridge, a lot more than the typical $20,000 it originally cost to build an iron bridge, or $30,000 for the earliest concrete bridge.
Geneva replaced its bridge in 1995, and St. Charles is completing work on its Illinois Highway 64 (Main Street) bridge. Batavia is anticipating needing reconstruction of its Wilson Street bridge, and North Aurora is making plans for a new deck on its bridge.
Construction of the newest concrete bridges hasn’t varied much from the same steel support with concrete filler designs, Nolan said, except that building materials have improved.
“Most of them are concrete decks on steel girders,” he said.
But most towns up and down the Fox emphasize their historic roots. They don’t want modern-looking bridges in the middle of towns with 19th Century storefronts.
“We wanted our new bridge to resemble the old bridge,” said Tom Talsma, director of public works for Geneva. “So we added ornamental lighting, pedestrian walkways and overlooks and facade panels, which gave the appearance of arched sections along the side.”
In other words, those beautiful arches you see on most of the rebuilt bridges are there just for show.
“Our bridge is in the middle of our downtown area, and people here enjoy being surrounded by things that are attractive and reflective of the history of the community, so we tried to reflect that in the design of our bridge,” said Mark Koenen, director of public works for St. Charles. “We gave ours a facade to give it an arched look, but that has nothing to do with the components.”
In this century, several new bridges have been added in several locations. Aurora put up bridges at Illinois Street, Indian Trail and North Avenue. St. Charles added bridges at Illinois Street and Prairie Street. Kane County built a bridge at Fabyan Parkway.
And even more bridges may be coming. Mayor Jeffery Schielke of Batavia would like to see another bridge in his town.
“We are looking to start some public discussions about it in the near future,” he said. “My position is that I think we should build another downtown bridge before we tear into the Wilson Street bridge.”
Furthermore, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Illinois Department of Transportation and the Kane County Division of Transportation recently completed an environmental impact statement that will be released in late May or early June with findings on locating five new bridges on the Fox River between the Kane-McHenry County line and the Kane-Kendall County line, according to Tom Rickert, chief of planning and programming for Kane County.
The five corridors that have been studied are near Bowes Road in Algonquin, the Chicago Central & Pacific/Stearns Road corridor near South Elgin, Red Gate Road in the north part of St. Charles and Wayne, the Union Pacific (formerly C&NW)/Dean Street corridor in St. Charles, and the Illinois Highway 56/Oak Street corridor in North Aurora. Some people, of course, think the bridges aren’t necessary, and they have been vocal about it. The same thing happened in 1974 when the Fabyan Parkway bridge was being contemplated, Rickert said.
“There was a lot of opposition,” he said. “Some people said it would never be used.” But each day now, he said, more than 22,000 vehicles may cross that bridge to get from one side of the Fox River to the other. A lot faster, and a lot easier, than those who crossed Sam McCarty’s bridges.
