Minneapolis' first bridge opened with a parade of horse-drawn sleighs and a giant dinner party
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At the river's edge in the North Loop, rusting ruins from Minneapolis' earliest days lie near the bank.
They are remnants of the city's 1855 suspension bridge — the first permanent span across the Mississippi River anywhere along its length.
Today, the area is part of First Bridge Park. The Hennepin Avenue Bridge, which now looms above the park and stretches towards the neon Grain Belt Beer sign, was actually the fourth version to be built at this site.
A reader asked Curious Minnesota, the Strib's reporting project fueled by great questions, for details about that first bridge. She also wondered: How did Minneapolis' residents get across the river before it was built?
The point in the river above St. Anthony Falls where the bridge was constructed had long been a crossing place for Native Americans. And as Minneapolis grew, crossing in the winter was relatively simple — if sometimes dangerous. People walked a path across the ice, according to newspaper accounts from the time.
During warmer months, they used a rope ferry — a floating platform connected by pulleys to a rope that spanned the river — that was built in 1847.
The bridge was constructed above the rope ferry's path. It was so important to the growing communities on each side of the river that the Minnesotian newspaper called its completion "an epoch."
"To the private enterprise of St. Anthony, and the county of Hennepin belongs the credit — we should say, honor and glory — of constructing the first bridge that has ever carried a living being across the Great River of the North American continent," the newspaper wrote.
The bridge's beginnings
In the 1850s, the town of St. Anthony grew on the river's east bank, while Minneapolis formed on the west bank.
To connect the two towns, the Territorial Legislature in 1852 granted a charter to build a bridge across the Mississippi. Prominent businessman Franklin Steele and other local leaders formed the Mississippi Bridge Company and hired an engineer named Thomas Griffith, according to the Minnesota Historical Society.
The suspension-style bridge took about eight months to build and cost $36,000, according to the Historical Society.
A parade of sleighs and speeches
It opened on Jan. 23, 1855, to great fanfare.
That morning, in a punny notice announcing "Suspension is the order of the day," the Minnesotian hailed the moment: "The Great Father of Waters has been suspended for the first time by the Wire Suspension Bridge at St. Anthony and Minneapolis."
They added that the newspaper's publication, too, would be suspended the following day. Its editors would be too busy attending the suspension bridge's opening celebration to put out a paper.
It was quite a party, despite below-zero temperatures. Hundreds lined up in horse-drawn sleighs at the St. Charles House in St. Anthony. With a celebratory banner at the front and a band playing, the procession went over the bridge, through the streets of Minneapolis and back again.
"Under a salute of cannon stationed on Nicollet Island, the procession moved down Main Street and across the bridge," the Minnesotian wrote. "The iron nerves of the substantial creation withstood firmly the tread of an [sic] hundred spirited steeds and not a muscle of the framework trembled beneath the burthen."
They arrived back at the St. Charles House for a dinner, toasts and speeches.
"It is a structure that, mechanically considered, has no superior in the world; and is destined to stand as a monument to Minnesota enterprise until the foundations of the eternal rocks beneath which its fastenings are planted, are upheaved by the final convulsions at the close of all earthly things," the Minnesotian wrote.
This grand pronouncement soon proved to be very premature.
An 'awful' storm and growing traffic
The Mississippi Bridge Company owned the new bridge and charged people a toll to cross it. It cost 10 cents to cross on foot, 25 cents for a horse-drawn carriage and 3 cents for every pig or sheep, according to newspaper reports at the time.
To keep people from falling off the bridge, there was a strict no-running policy, historian Michael Rainville, Jr. wrote in the Mill City Times in 2021.
"If they did catch you going faster than a walking pace, they would fine you $10! That doesn't seem like much now, but the average day wage for those who worked in the mills was 25¢," he wrote.
The bridge was open just two months when a storm destroyed much of it. On March 25, 1855, high winds whipped down the Mississippi, snapped the cables and tore down a large section of the bridge.
"The crash was awful, equal to the thundering of heavy guns … the center of the beautiful structure came down," the Minnesotian wrote, adding that the amount of damage could not be less than $7,000. "It was feared that the towers would fall, but they stood nobly."
Repairs took months and leaders had to put the ferry back into service. By that June, the bridge still wasn't finished but people could cross on foot "on the loose planks for a dime apiece," according to a note in the Daily Pioneer. It fully reopened a month later.
In the 1860s, Hennepin County bought the bridge from the Mississippi Bridge Company. Once the county had collected enough in tolls to pay off the bonds that financed it, the bridge became free to cross.
After Minneapolis and St. Anthony became one city in 1872, the city took over the bridge and the responsibility to keep up its condition. As traffic boomed, it deteriorated. Within two years, an engineer recommended building a new, bigger bridge right next to it, according to an account in the Minneapolis Tribune.
Building new bridges
When the second bridge opened in 1877, the city tore down the first one. A third bridge — this one a steel arched span — opened in 1891. It stood for nearly a century, until city leaders in the 1980s decided not to invest in repairing it and instead built yet another bridge.
The current Hennepin Avenue Bridge, officially named the Father Louis Hennepin Bridge, opened in 1990. The $28.6 million structure didn't spark a grand party on the same scale as that first bridge did.
Still, city officials held a public celebration on the evening of Sept. 12, 1990, and turned on the bridge's lights for the first time. Star Tribune photographer Brian Peterson was there. His photos captured its glow on that first night, reaching across the water towards the light of the Grain Belt Beer sign.
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