For 150 years, the Eads Bridge has linked St. Louis to the East.
James Eads was born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, northwest of Cincinnati in 1820. From an early age, he began learning the ways of the fickle Mississippi River.
In 1833, the riverboat carrying him and his family on their move to St. Louis caught fire and sank in the river. Eight people were killed in the blaze, but Eads and his parents survived. The 13-year-old Eads, whose family had lost everything they owned in the wreck, was forced to give up school and begin selling apples in the St. Louis streets to make money.
By late 1833, Eads progressed from selling apples to working a job for Williams & Duhring Dry Goods Store, a position that included access to his employer’s library, where Eads read books and studied engineering.
At the age of 18, he moved on to another job, this time to a position as a purser on a riverboat, responsible for handling travelers’ accounts and customer service while riding on the rivers. This is where Eads’s engineering mind blossomed.
During his frequent trips on the Mississippi River that followed, Eads became aware of the many boats that had sunk there and considered ways to salvage artifacts from sunken vessels. By age 22, he had developed a “salvage boat,” a surface vessel, from which he could descend in a specially designed diving bell to the bottom of the river. With this, he began recovering freight, such as iron and lead, which had been lost in wrecks.
By then, the Civil War was looming. River travel was essential for transporting troops and supplies, and whoever had control of the river had the upper hand. Eads proposed the construction of ironclad warships in order to gain control of the Mississippi River from the Confederacy. These ships were steam powered and had a shallow draft, designed to operate on the river. Eads’s proposal was accepted by the United States government, and the warship construction began.
His ironclad boats aided Union forces in fighting at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson and later at the battles of Memphis, Island No. 10, Vicksburg, and Mobile Bay. The vessels were the first ironclad boats in the world to engage in enemy combat.
• State Historical Society of Missouri
HOW THE BRIDGE BEGAN
By the end of the Civil War, the railroad industry was booming and warships were no longer in demand. The growth in railroad transportation made it apparent that the city of St. Louis needed a bridge across the Mississippi River. A bridge would connect Missouri to Illinois and the prosperous northeast, allowing St. Louis to better compete with its northern rival in transportation and commerce, Chicago.
At the time, railroad freight that was crossing the river had to be unloaded, taken across on ferries, and then reloaded on the other side, greatly increasing freight costs and delivery times. These problems discouraged shippers from routing goods through the city.
In 1865, the United States Congress authorized the construction of an interstate bridge at St. Louis, and in 1866, a group of St. Louis businessmen formed the Illinois Bridge Company and began searching for a chief engineer to build the bridge. By this time, Eads was 47 years old and had spent over two decades on the Mississippi troubleshooting engineering problems and creating efficient solutions. The Illinois Bridge Company decided to name Eads its chief engineer based on his reputation for understanding the river and its movement and his knowledge of engineering metal structures.
The only catch was that he had never built a bridge before.
The full article was orginally printed in the June 2026 issue of Missouri Life. To read the rest of the story get the June issue here.
