- Hi, I'm Mark Peihl.

I'm the archivist for the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County.

We're here in the Hjemkomst Center in Moorhead, Minnesota, and this is my Artifact Spotlight.

( Bright ambient music ) Today I want to talk about bridges here in Fargo-Moorhead.

It always takes about 10 or 15 years to get a bridge built between Fargo and Moorhead.

It always has.

The same is true back in the old days.

You've got two cities, two states, the federal government is involved and people argue about who's going to build them, who's going to pay for them, and maintain them.

Same true in the 19th century.

In 1872, the first bridge across the river, the Railroad Bridge in the Northern Pacific Railway, was built.

And for about 10 years after that, the two cities, Fargo and Moorhead, argued about whether to build a wagon bridge on the north side of the downtowns or one on the south side of the downtowns.

And finally, in 1883, they compromised.

Instead of building one decent bridge, they built two lousy bridges.

Tried to save money that way and it didn't pay off.

I've got some artifacts out here that were remnants from the South Bridge.

The South Bridge is where the Main Avenue Bridge is today between Fargo and Moorhead.

The second bridge was called the North Bridge, and that ran from what's now NP Avenue in Fargo to the Northeast up to where American Crystal Sugar has their downtown headquarters just south of the Hjemkomst center, where we are.

And by the turn of the century, both of these bridges were really falling apart and had to get rebuilt.

They weren't built for modern traffic.

Eventually that became so dangerous actually to cross it, even pedestrians were blocked from crossing the bridges.

The Main Avenue Bridge where these came from, the South Bridge, was torn down in 1936.

(bridge collapsing) A fellow named A.W.

Bowman, who was actually the President of the historical society back in those days, managed to get ahold of the parts from the Main Avenue Bridge and donated them to our museum in 1936.

The first artifact is this bridge plaque right here, and it says Milwaukee Bridge and Iron Works.

That was the company that was in charge of building the South Bridge, the Main Avenue Bridge.

The date on it is 1883.

There were two of these plaques, one on either end of the bridge, high up above the bridge.

And in 1883 steamboats were still operating out of Fargo Moorhead.

The steamboats had pretty tall smokestacks, and the Army Corps of Engineers required that all of the bridges be able to turn out of the way in order to allow these steamboats to pass.

1883 was a big bridge building year.

Both the North and the South Bridge were built and both railroad bridges, the Northern Pacific and the great Northern Railway bridges were rebuilt in those years, 1883 and 1884.

So all of them had to turn to allow Steamboat to pass.

These improvements cost each of them $10,000 in 1883 dollars, and that's a lot of money today.

The way that they operated each of the bridges was built on a round, central pier and the main structure of the bridge actually literally balanced on top of that round concrete structure.

And at the very top of that structure was basically a Lazy Susan, a turntable, and there was a mechanism for turning that bridge, When a Steamboat wanted to cross the path of the bridge in order to get the bridge out of the way, a local policeman or a bridge tender would come out with a key.

And we have one here.

This one is from the Main Avenue bridge right here.

It has a socket on the far end over here.

This would have a wooden bar going across the top of it, so it was kind of T-shaped.

A bridge tender or local policemen would insert this key, that bottom end of that key, down through a hole in the deck and engage this gear right here.

This pinion gear right here would engage with a rack gear that ran around the very top of the bridge footing.

And the bridge tender would turn this key and that would in turn, turn this pinion gear and it would run around the rack gear.

And very slowly that bridge would turn out of its way to allow the steam boat to pass.

And when they were done, they would turn it back of course, so wagons could continue going across the bridge.

When they were first built and first installed, the Moorhead Daily News reported that they were so well-balanced that a small child would have no trouble turning the bridge But I've never seen a photograph of a Fargo Moorhead bridge turned to allow a Steamboat to pass.

They were only used for just a few years.

They were installed in 1883, 1884, and by the spring of 1888, railroads had put the steamboats out of business.

It was so much faster and so much easier to move materials and people by rail than it was by the steam boats, the steamboats couldn't compete.

In the spring of 1888 they all moved to Grand Forks, and they never really came back to Fargo-Moorhead.

So these things were probably only used a few dozen times.

And these artifacts are just a couple of the items, thousands of thousands of artifacts that we have here at the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County.

In some cases in our storage areas, some pieces out on display.

Come on down, check them out.

We'd love to have you visit our museum.

(upbeat ambient music) - Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008.

And by the members of Prairie Public.