Photography by A. Rino, courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
Walt Whitman wrote poems about bridges, trains, and telegraph lines in tribute to his favorite brother, Thomas Jefferson Whitman (“Jeff”) who worked as a civil engineer—and spent nearly all his career in St. Louis. In 1867, Jeff left Brooklyn and became our Superintendent of Water Works; he didn’t design the Bissell Street Water Tower (a myth perpetuated by Walt in Jeff’s bragged-up obituary), but he did oversee the construction of a good deal of the city’s early water infrastructure. Jeff was friends with James Eads, as well as Baden-born engineer Henry Flad, pictured at left, who sits here with Jeff at an unidentified biergarten. Perhaps the two are drinking beer because they knew it was safer than the water; this is 1876, when summer still brought the cholera. Or maybe they’re drowning sorrows. Jeff had plenty: three years earlier, he lost his wife Mattie to throat cancer at 37. A few months later, his mother died. All the while, Walt lay paralyzed in bed after a stroke. He recovered almost miraculously—he outlived his much-younger sibling Jeff, after all—and in 1879, came to St. Louis to visit and spent a month with Jeff in a now-demolished house on Pine Street. He doted on his nieces Jessie and Hattie (short for “Mannhatta”—she was named after her uncle’s famous poem); visited several kindergartens and did not discourage the impression he was Santa Claus; and obsessively visited the river and Eads’ Bridge. In all, he proclaimed St. Louis splendid. But, as he wrote his sister Lou, “there are just two things here you & I w'd never get used to, & would spoil all—that is the air you breathe is always tainted with coal smoke & pungent gas—& a perpetual dust & smut & little black motes, that forever smut your clothes & hands & face, all the time, night & day—So you see there are always some bad points, even to the greatest & best—But the folks here don't seem to mind it, or think it is any thing.”
