Eads Bridge

James Buchanan Eads approached the Mississippi as an engineer accustomed to solving problems other people considered impossible. His bridge used three great steel arches and foundations sunk deep into the riverbed, creating a permanent rail and road connection between St. Louis and Illinois.

Completed in 1874, Eads Bridge was the first bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis and one of the earliest major structures built with steel. Its construction helped demonstrate the possibilities of steel for large-scale engineering and tied the city's transportation network more firmly to eastern railroads.

The bridge became both infrastructure and monument: a gateway into the city whose dark arches still frame views of the river, the Arch and the historic riverfront.

Building that engineering marvel came at a terrible human cost. Workers excavating the bridge foundations labored inside pneumatic caissons deep beneath the Mississippi, breathing compressed air at pressures medicine did not yet fully understand. Decompression sickness—then called caisson disease or the bends—struck scores of them. Historical accounts commonly put the death toll at fifteen, with many more workers seriously injured or permanently disabled, making the bridge not only an engineering breakthrough but an early and brutal lesson in the dangers of pressurized construction.