Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Volume 12, No. 28, July, 1873 by Various
page 33 of 268 (12%)

[Illustration: MOUNT ARARAT--PROFILE ROCK.]

If every passenger could stop once, and study the Susquehanna bridge
crossing the river between Perryville and Havre de Grace, he would
have a most profound respect for its projectors and builders. For many
years all transport by cars was interrupted here, and travelers and
merchandise were transported by ferry-boat, causing wearisome delays
and extra expense. But now a bridge 3273 feet long and with 1000 feet
of trestling, resting on thirteen huge piers built on foundations in
water from twenty-seven to sixty feet deep, and costing a million and
a half of dollars, carries all safely over, and defies floods and ice.
This bridge, one of the triumphs of engineering and a just source
of pride to the road, has already saved in time and trouble a large
percentage of its cost. It was threatened the past winter by the
ice-pack which filled the river back to Port Deposit, and which seemed
to promise for some time the destruction of that well-named little
town. It is hard to believe that in a country so extensive as ours,
with all kinds of lands and town-sites, any one could begin to build a
town in such a situation. It clings to the broken and rocky shores
and hillsides as lichens adhere to rocks and to the bark of trees or
swallows' nests to the eaves of a barn. There it is, however, and,
judging from its costly houses, churches and business appearance, its
inhabitants have found it a profitable place to stay in. Port Deposit
last winter, when the river was filled with ice from shore to shore
and for miles in both directions, fissured and cracked and covered
with mud, logs and débris, seemed on the verge of destruction; and
it was easy to believe that if the river did rise suddenly the moving
mass of ice, like some huge glacier, would sweep away all evidences
of humanity, leaving behind only the glacial scratches and the _roches
DigitalOcean Referral Badge