Monday - October 10, 2011

Curiosity Killed The Drew

then went to here:

with a side trip here:

and wound up here:

It was a really nice early fall day yesterday so we took a drive out into the local hinterlands and had a bit of a ramble. We went out along the Musconetcong River for about a dozen miles, up over into Port Murray on the outskirts of Hackettstown then back up and over the mountains into High Bridge and Lebanon Township. It’s a pretty drive through the woods and fields; this part of the state is lightly populated, what I call exoburban, but that gives way to farmlands and forests within half a mile of the main roads. This area is rich in history, from colonial iron mines and forges to places where Washington’s army set up artillery batteries to stave off the British during the Revolution to many places that were once significant points in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, right on up to various modernities. Each era has left its mark on the land, although many of those landmarks are now almost lost to sight and memory. This makes a scenic drive around here a bit of a learning experience, even if a large part of that learning is done online after we get home. And it’s all connected somehow ... which is why the internet is a dangerous thing. Learning about what was and what is, and tracking down those connections can suck up your life. Hours go by; the curiosity slaked by finding one thing out is just refreshed again by seeing something else a bit related, and wanting to know more about that. And on and on it goes.

The Musconetcong River is one of those famous trout streams that the fly fishermen so love. It flows across a good part of the state from east to west, eventually joining the Delaware River at Phillipsburg on the PA border. Today it’s hard to envision such a thing, but once upon a time it was one of the major thoroughfares across the state; sections of it were part of the Morris Canal works that was built in the early 19th century.

The first picture of the little green bridge is a bit of local color. It is the earliest example of an eye-rod Warren truss adjustable tension pony bridge in NJ. It was built here in New Hampton by Francis Lowthorp in 1869 out of cast iron. This one spans the Musconetcong River in the nearby town of New Hampton. There are two other Lowthorp iron bridges here in Hunterdon County, both only a year younger and both still in use, including the rather famous one we have here in Clinton by our equally famous Red Mill.

Perhaps a mile further down Musconetcong River Road we came upon these huge and brooding stone pylons by the very edge of the street. Looking like something out of Ozymandius they shoot up out of the ground and stand 5-8 stories tall, and march down the mountainside and out across a farmer’s fields. They are the pylons for a large bridge that crossed the river at elevation. The bridge is long gone. There is no town on the top of the mountain. There is no neighborhood up there. There are no roads there, only forest. And there is nothing at the other end. So why a bridge? It turns out that this was the Changewater Trestle, a railroad bridge put up in 1859 for a railroad that ceased to exist long ago. The bridge and the tracks survived until 1959 when both were dismantled. The pylons were cut down only enough to no longer be a danger, and their bases were just left in place.

I spent a bunch of time looking at railroad history in our area. Once upon a time there were tracks everywhere. The sleepy little towns were busy with factories, the farms had to shuttle their crops to the cities (New Jersey really was the market Garden State), and of course all that coal had to be brought in from Pennsylvania. I’ve written before about Upon the Road of Anthracite, the world of coal that opened up so much of this area long ago. What struck me was the serendipity of the whole thing; half a mile south of this bridge is an old iron works, where the ore dug out of the ground in nearby High Bridge was smelted. That railroad probably carried those rough smeltings 10 miles further south to the sleepy little town of Lambertville, where the castings from the bridge were forged. So it was a very local harmonious endeavor, but it still amazes me that the pristine and spotless little towns in our area were once centers of heavy industry, little Mt. Doom zones of smoke and fire, heat and noise, danger and newly created wealth. How times change.

A tangential trip on my choo-choo research ( I guess that would be a siding in railroad terms? ) gave me the picture of the Pullman car. That’s the Union Gap diner in 1974 (note the Ford Pinto) just after it had taken delivery of the observation car from the Blue Comet, once a passenger train of the Central New Jersey Railroad, back from the days when trains had names. The diner has since been renovated and modernized, yet the train car still sticks out the side of the building. What comes around goes around: The diner is half a mile from my home, and right on the edge of Rt 78, one of NJ’s 3 east-west highways. Rt 78 follows old Rt 22. I don’t know if it once had train tracks or a canal on it, but the area is called Union Gap for a reason: this is where there was a gap in the mountains to the west, and an easy path to get to the interior of the young nation from New York City. Stage coach lines once ran up and down the road when it was just a dirt track; one of our state’s finest restaurants a couple miles west of here was a stopping point. It was the main road from New Brunswick NJ to Easton PA. Before those days George Washington could have run his battered army down that trail when Cornwallis was chasing him, even stopping off down the street here at Bonnell’s Tavern for a cold one (the building still exists but hasn’t poured a draft in 100 years) but he didn’t. He went straight across the state from New York City to Philadelphia. How about that? George Washington, inventor of the Jersey Turnpike.

Looking at railroads and bridge trusses lead me to that last picture somehow. That’s an aircraft carrier in the foreground, the HMS Argus, one of England’s earliest attempts at floating runways. It didn’t work too well. That ship started life as the Italian ocean liner Conte Rosso, but it got co-opted (laws of angary) when WWI came about. The amazing pile of girders in the background is the Firth of Forth bridge, a multiple cantilever arch truss creation up in Scotland between Edinburgh and Firth. This was the first all steel bridge ever built, and it pretty much defines Drew-spec. The bridge was tremendously overbuilt on purpose, because an earlier bridge on the Firth of Tay had collapsed in the wind and had caused the worst train disaster in history at that point. So the bridge was built about 20 times stronger than it really needed to be, to regain public confidence. 120 years later and the bridge is still so strong that it barely even wiggles even in the strongest storms. It is a huge thing, the pinnacle of Victorian engineering, stretching nearly as far as San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge (ok, 600 feet less, but still 8276 feet) built 60 years later, with foundation plinths 70 feet across that sink 90 feet or more down below the bay to bedrock, circular main beams 12 feet in diameter, and the tops of the arches 350 feet above the water. Built in less than 7 years, it can still carry two full size modern freight trains on its double tracks. While this steel giant was being built, the fwench got busy and built the Eiffel Tower. Out of wrought iron.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/10/2011 at 09:13 AM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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