Southwest Virginia

@bk24hurst

Virginia, USA Katılım Kasım 2025

127 Takip Edilen112 Takipçiler

Southwest Virginia@bk24hurst·15h

@free2b1776 It’s the best ever

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NOLA Girl in Bama🇺🇸🇺🇸@free2b1776·20h

Band of Brothers is so good! Love it! 🇺🇸🇺🇸

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174

2.8K

Southwest Virginia@bk24hurst·15h

@miles_commodore A

Miles Commodore@miles_commodore·1d

Greatest black male actor of all time... A. Denzel Washington B. Morgan Freeman C. Samuel L Jackson D. Eddie Murphy E. Sydney Poitier F. Someone else Who ya got?

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557

54.8K

Southwest Virginia@bk24hurst·16h

@EchoesofWarYT Incredible.

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Echoes of War@EchoesofWarYT·1d

The Brooklyn Bridge opened on this day in 1883. The chief engineer was dead. His son was paralyzed and bedridden, watching from a window across the river. The bridge was finished by a woman. Her name was Emily Warren Roebling, and almost no one talks about her. In 1869, John Augustus Roebling was surveying the bridge's location on a dock in Brooklyn when a ferry slammed into the pilings and crushed his foot. The toes were amputated. He refused further treatment, preferring "water therapy." He died of tetanus three weeks later, before a single stone of the bridge had been laid. His son Washington took over. Washington was a Civil War veteran, an engineer, and a workaholic. He went down into the caissons, the giant pressurized chambers sunk beneath the East River where workers dug out the foundations. The pressure was crushing. Men came up bleeding from the ears, paralyzed, screaming. They called it "caisson disease." We now call it the bends. Washington was struck so badly he became permanently disabled. By the early 1870s he could barely stand. He could not speak above a whisper. He could not visit the construction site. For the next eleven years, he watched the bridge being built through a telescope from a bedroom window in Brooklyn Heights. So his wife took over. Emily Roebling had no formal engineering training. She had been the daughter of a New York state assemblyman, well-read but conventionally educated. When her husband collapsed, she taught herself higher mathematics, stress analysis, catenary curves, materials science, and bridge specifications. She became the only person who could translate between the bedridden chief engineer and the workers on site. For more than a decade, every decision, every order, every conversation with city officials and steel suppliers and skeptical politicians passed through her. The men on the bridge stopped asking for Washington. They asked for Mrs. Roebling. A week before opening day, she became the first person to cross the completed bridge. She rode in a horse-drawn carriage. In her lap she carried a live rooster, an ancient symbol of victory. Workers along the span stopped, took off their hats, and cheered her as she passed. On May 24, 1883, the bridge opened to the public. President Chester Arthur attended. 150,300 people walked across that day. The cannons fired. Speeches were given. Abram Hewitt, in the keynote address, called the bridge "an everlasting monument to the self-sacrificing devotion of woman." Six days later, a woman on the bridge tripped going down a staircase and screamed. Someone yelled that the bridge was collapsing. Twelve people were trampled to death in the stampede. The bridge did not collapse. It is still standing. 143 years later, 120,000 cars and 30,000 pedestrians cross it every single day. John Roebling designed it. Washington Roebling started building it. Emily Roebling finished it. Her name is on a small plaque, added in 1951, almost 70 years after she crossed it with a rooster in her lap.