Railroad Bridge Company

City: Rock Island

County: Rock Island

State: Illinois

The Railroad Bridge Company was incorporated by Joel A. Matteson, Joseph E. Sheffield, Norman B. Judd, and Henry Farnam on January 17, 1853 via an act of the Illinois General Assembly, with the aim of building what would be the first railroad bridge across the Mississippi River. The effort was jointly organized by the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad and the Mississippi & Missouri Railroad, and was to consist of two bridges: one from the city of Rock Island, Illinois to the island of Rock Island, and a second from the island to Davenport, Iowa, with an embankment on the island connecting the two bridges. The company began constructing the bridge on July 16, 1853 and completed it in April 1856. The bridge was 1,535 feet long and had a single railroad track. On May 6, 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton struck the bridge and was destroyed. The owners of the Effie Afton, Jacob S. Hurd, Joseph W. Smith, and Alexander Kidwell, sued the Railroad Bridge Company in the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The company hired Abraham Lincoln as part of their defense team in 1857, and his involvement in such a high-profile case substantially aided his rise to prominence. After the jury failed to agree on a verdict in the case of the Effie Afton, a different steamboat owner filed a complaint in 1858 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Iowa seeking the removal of the bridge. This effort was ultimately unsuccessful and the Rock Island bridge was an active railroad bridge until it was replaced by an iron bridge in 1872.

Daniel W. Stowell et al., eds., The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 3:308-83; “An Act to Incorporate a Bridge Company by the Title Hereinafter Named,” 17 January 1853, Private Laws of Illinois (1853), 329-30; D. W. Flagler, A History of the Rock Island Arsenal (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877), 57-62.