The National Weather Service said many of the crests across the region this season will rank in the top 10 . Opened October 22, 2016, Big River Crossing is the longest public pedestrian/bike bridge across the Mississippi River, providing dramatic views of its ever-changing landscape. 312-15, quote from p. 315; Kane, St. Anthony, p. 94. Fortunately, unlike Illinois, MN rehabilitates and keeps some of its truss bridges, including this one. 4 min read. Walter Havighurst, Upper Mississippi, A Wilderness Saga, (New York: Farrar & Rinehart; New York: J. J. Lying at the head of navigation, they demanded a river capable of delivering the immigrants needed to populate the land (not considering that they had taken it from Native Americans) and the tools and provisions needed to fully use it. Woods, Knights of the Plow: Oliver Kelley and the Origins of the Grange in Republican Ideology, (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991), Chapters 7 and 8, supports and greatly expands on Barns' argument that Kelley actively pushed economic and political solutions and/or tacitly approved while others did so. Prior to the war, with a few exceptions, Congress and/or the President had opposed a federal role in internal improvements.26, The 1866 act provided for the first project to focus on the whole upper river.27 It directed the Corps to survey the Mississippi River between St. Anthony Falls and the Rock Island Rapids, with a view to ascertain the feasible means, by economizing the water of the stream, of insuring the passage, at all navigable seasons, of boats drawing four feet of water. The Twin Cities had to see that the entire Mississippi River was remade. 247, 40th Cong., 2d sess., p. 9. Looking at some of the different expert estimates, it can be said that the Mississippi River is more than 2,300 miles in length. Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long both not only commented on how confined the river became above Hastings, they rowed its width to see how few strokes they needed. Accepting Mackenzies arguments and under continual pressure by navigation proponents in Minneapolis, Congress authorized the Five-Foot Project in Aid of Navigation, in the River and Harbor Act of August 18, 1894. Led by Ignatius Donnelly, Grange supporters had organized the People's Anti-Monopoly party, with a platform striking at monopolies, advocating state railroad controls, and denouncing postwar corruption. Annual Reports, 1867, pp. Merrick lists the number or arrivals and the number of boats at St. Paul for each of these years. 206-09, 209, 246; William J. Petersen, Captains and Cargoes of Early Upper Mississippi Steamboats, Wisconsin Magazine of History 13 (1929_30):227-32; Mildred Hartsough, From Canoe to Steel Barge, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1934), pp. The first railroad bridge across the Mississippi was open for business. A. Humphreys, the Chief of Engineers, ordered Brevet Major General and Major of Engineers Gouverneur K. Warren to St. Paul to begin the Corps' work on the upper Mississippi River (Figure 4). It lasted until 1936, when it was replaced by a much. Hundreds of miles of riverbank had been secured with riprap. Merrick, Old Times, p. 162, says that From 1852 to 1857 there were not boats enough to carry the people who were flocking into the newly-opened farmers' and lumbermans' paradise.. Woods, Knights, pp. The wing dams' success depended upon the main channel's volume and velocity. Bridge 29-10-03 Pier Railroad over Sugar River, Sullivan County, NH, closed to traffic. Key local projects included Locks and Dams 1 (Ford Dam) and 2 (Hastings), Lower and Upper St. Anthony Falls Locks and Dams, and the little known Meeker Island Lock and Dam, which was the rivers first and shortest-lived lock and dam (Figure 2). Confluence with the Ohio River (See List of crossings of the Lower Mississippi River). Annual Report, 1890, p. 2034; Annual Report, 1892, pp. Historians generally agree that with the Civil War's end the federal government took a very different position on internal improvements. Reeling from Chicago's increasing dominance over the region's trade, they saw the river as their best counteroffensive. 67-68; Duties for the middle Mississippi stayed with the Office of Western Improvements in Cincinnati until 1873, when St. Louis became the new office for the middle river; see Dobney, River Engineers, pp. . . 58, Survey of Upper Mississippi River, p. 25. This is a list of all current and notable former bridges or other crossings of the Upper Mississippi River which begins at the Mississippi River's source and extends to its confluence with the Ohio River at Cairo, Illinois. The Wabasha Avenue bridge was the first to cross the Mississippi River in the city of St. Paul, built in the 1880s and replaced amid controversy in the 1990s. 40-42; William D. Barns, Oliver Hudson Kelley and the Genesis of the Grange: A Reappraisal, Agricultural History 41 (July 1967):229-30. To achieve the 1/2- foot channel, the Corps had to expand upon the channel constriction experiments. While the Minnesota legislature appointed someone else to finish Norton's term, Windom won the seat in 1871. Minneapolis had captured title to the head of navigation, but the low dams had eliminated St. Pauls hope for securing hydropower. Kane, Rivalry, pp. Transportation officials in both states are studying plans that include possibly replacing the 55-year-old span. The count in 2011 was 60,700 vehicles per day. And the Midwest needed the South's cotton, rice, sugar, and molasses. Despite the growing menace of the railroads, river traffic remained strong.38. No. The MRL&M was abandoned in 1938. . In other words, Congress asked the Corps to determine how to establish a continuous, 4-foot channel for the upper river at low water. While the First Battle of Porto raged on March 29, 1809, thousands of civilians attempted to flee a bayonet charge by the French imperial army by crossing the Ponte das Barcas, a pontoon bridge. U.S. Army, Corps of Engineers, Annual Report of the Chief of Engineers,1872, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1876-1940), p. 309. More than 170 bridges (foot and railroad) span the Mississippi River on its journey from source to mouth. There is the city of St. Paul, and there is the city of Minneapolis. Those that swayed back and forth with the current they called sawyers. Barns credits Kelley with founding the Grange, recognizing the role of others, particularly of Miss Carrie Hall, Kelley's niece. From this work, Warren contended that in its natural state the Mississippi River's navigation channel frequently changed and that the Corps would have to survey the river each year until they understood how it worked.29 In some reaches, Warren reported, sandbars moved in waves along the channel bottom, looking something like snowdrifts. 23-25; Tweet, A History of the Rock Island District, U.S. Army, Corps of Engineers, 1866-1983, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), p. 39; William J. Petersen, Steamboating on the Upper Mississippi, (Iowa City: The State Historical Society of Iowa, 1968), pp. One person has died after an Amtrak train hit a car that was on the tracks at a Mobile, Alabama, rail crossing Wednesday night, police said. From their pioneer days on, they insisted that the federal government should improve the river for navigation. When it opened in 1892, the Frisco was the third-longest bridge in the world and was the first to span the Mississippi south of St. Louis. The miller's fear, he said, "is another waterpower that might result incidentally from our effort to get Boats to the Falls of St. Anthony.75, Minneapolis navigation boosters clearly saw that Meeker's project would extend navigation above St. Paul, which was their primary reason for supporting it. (The 9-foot channel today is based on the same benchmark.). Alberta Kirchner Hill spent 19 summers (1898-1917) with her father's fleet as they built the dams for the government. The company needed the grant, the state contended, because the company's income from water power would be limited by the inexhaustible resources in this respect above and on the falls and because the company's state charter required it to lock boats through free.73 Anticipating opposition from the millers at St. Anthony, the state claimed that the petitions principal purpose was to bring steamboats to Minneapolis and that hydropower was incidental.74 Meeker, himself, emphasized navigation. The millers recognized that the release of water from the reservoirs for navigation in the later summer and fall would increase the flow of water to keep their mills turning longer and more consistently. The outbreak ranks third worldwide for producing the most tornadoes in a 24-hour period, with . Todd Shallat, Structures in the Stream, Water, Science, and the Rise of the U.S. Army Corps of Egineers, (Austin: University of Texas, 1994), p. 141. As Mackenzie anticipated, Congress, under pressure from Minneapolis to do something, provided $50,000 to the Corps to remove boulders, which the Engineers did during the summer of 1890 and in 1891. Blegen, Minnesota, A History of the State, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975, 1963), p. 290. Major Francis R. Shunk to Minneapolis Mayor J. C. Haynes, February 17, 1909. Rail lines were generally shorter, more direct, and could reach deep into lands served by no navigable rivers. The desire to improve navigation on the upper river affected the river above the Twin Cities, as well. Doc. Where steamboat pilots followed the deepest channel, as it hugged one shore or the other, leaning trees might sweep poorly placed cargo or an unwary passenger from a steamboat's deck. Cloud Times. II The Midwest, (The University of Alabama Press, 1973), pp. . . he concluded, calling on Congress to appropriate funding for every navigable stream in the West and to open the natural outlets free to all.47 To restore river traffic, Kelley insisted that the Mississippi needed grants like those given to railroads, and the Grange had to establish an agent in St. Louis to buy and sell Minnesota's products. As canoes and steamboats drew people to the river, roads and railroads pulled them away. While some arrived by way of the Great Lakes, many settlers entering Iowa, Minnesota and western Wisconsin made part of their journey on the upper river.6 Historian Roald Tweet contends that, The number of immigrants boarding boats at St. Louis and traveling upriver to St. Paul dwarfed the 1849 gold rush to California and Oregon.7 More than one million passengers arrived at or left from St. Louis in 1855 alone.8 As a result, the population of the four upper river states above Missouri ballooned between 1850 and 1860. Missouri's highest bridge is the Christopher S. Bond Bridge in Kansas City. 319-320; Kane, St. Anthony, p. 96. . In 1892, Mackenzie again insisted that only locks and dams could regularly entice steamboats above Meeker Island; any other efforts, he charged, wasted time and money.89, Signaling a possible break, the Chief of Engineers, on February 15, 1893, directed Mackenzie to prepare new and exact estimates for locks and dams for this portion of the river . No. Edward L. Pross, A History of Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Bills, 1866-1933, Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1938, p. 44. Formed in 1868 by Oliver Hudson Kelley, a Minnesota farmer who had moved to Washington, D.C., to work as a clerk in the Department of Agriculture, the Grange had established nearly 1,400 chapters in 25 states by 1873 (Figure 6).44 The number of chapters multiplied to more than 10,000 by the end of the year.