| When the Civil War began, Eads was summoned from semi-retirement in St. Louis to offer
the U.S. government advice on how to wrest control of the lower Mississippi River from the
Confederacy. Eads proposed building seven armor-plated, shallow-draft gunboats to help
Union land forces overpower Confederate forts impeding their progress downriver. Eads
accomplished this monumental task in less than one hundred days. The Cairo,
Carondelet, Cincinnati, Louisville, Mound City, Pittsburg, and St. Louis, collectively
known as City Class Ironclads, were commissioned and in service on the western waters by
January 1862. These gunboats were the first ironclads built in the United States and
played an integral role in winning the "Mighty Mississippi" for the Union and
thus cutting the Confederacy in two. Not to be outdone, Eads also designed a complex
steam-driven turret used on river monitors during the war that rivaled John Ericsson's
celebrated model. Two of these monitors, the Chickasaw and Winnebago, made
history as part of David "Damn the torpedoes!" Farragut's fleet when he entered
Mobile Bay in 1864.
Soon after the war ended, Eads set out to accomplish another amazing feat: the building
of the first bridge across the Mississippi River at St. Louis. Due to specifications that
the span be at least 50 feet above the surface for smokestack clearance and the central
span had to be 500 feet long, learned engineers pronounced the job impossible. Undaunted,
Eads spent the next seven years building the engineering marvel. When it opened in 1874,
the bridge was one of the manmade wonders of America. The structure still stands in St.
Louis as a testament to Eads' remarkable talent.
Eads then embarked upon another memorable project. This time, he was asked to devise a
way to open one of the three sluggish streams which formed the terminus of the Mississippi
River for the benefit of New Orleans merchants. To create a 30-foot-deep ship channel
through South Pass, Eads proposed building twin jetties that would force the river to dig
its own channel by speeding the flow of water. The project took five years and was
completed in 1879. Precisely as Eads had predicted, the current scoured its own bottom,
pushing the silt far out into the deep Gulf waters. Eads had succeeded once again in
taming "Old Man River."
After completing the jetties, Eads traveled widely and was regularly consulted by
governments pondering water transportation problems. His test project was to build a
"ship railroad" across southern Mexico that would conceivably cut thousands of
miles off the trip between the eastern and western coasts of the United States. This
project, however, was never realized. The father of the Eads gunboats, bridge, and jetties
died in Nassau, Bahamas in 1887 at the age of sixty-six years. |
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