Perhaps one of the most well-known individual stone arch bridge builders is Walter Sharp. While primarily building in Kansas, he also built several stone arch bridges in other places, such as New Mexico. Walter Sharp seemingly appeared out of nowhere early on in Kansas’s years of stone arch bridge building. He quickly rose to prominence, as his highly competitive pricing allowed him to win numerous contracts. And, unlike bridges built by other builders, Walter Sharp’s bridges rarely failed — surviving time and floods much better than wooden or even iron truss bridges did.
While in Kansas Walter Sharp was already well known in Marion, Chase, Greenwood, and Butler counties, it was in Cowley County where he really rose to fame. Cowley County needed permanent bridges at affordable costs, and Walter Sharp provided them. The Cowley commissioners were apparently already aware of the permanence of stone arch bridges, but did not know of anyone who could build them at a cost they could afford. Stone arch bridges could be fantastically expensive (as an example, the famous Clements Bridge in Chase County, Kansas, was triple the cost of the largest stone arch bridge in the state — the Dunkard Mill Bridge, which Walter Sharp built.) However, whereas some stone arch bridges were quite expensive, Walter Sharp’s pricing proved to be but slightly more expensive than the cost of a steel bridge, and his stone bridges lasted much longer with much less maintenance than a steel bridge could.
The Secret to Walter Sharp’s Success: Local Labor
One factor that played into Walter Sharp’s competitive bridge prices was the fact that he used local labor. Rather than hire a team of professional masons, Walter Sharp hired local people — usually farmers — to build his bridges. This practice kept his costs down and made his bridges rather popular projects locally. These structures were built with a degree of pride, often by the very people who would use them the most.
To be sure, these local farmers often had little stone masonry training, but they were shown what to do, and with what success needs only to be determined by looking at Walter Sharp’s bridges. Granted, the spandrel walls of the bridges were pretty simple to build; the stones were usually quarried out of hillsides with feathers-and-wedges. Since the stones were limestone, they could be cut very simply into massive, brick-like blocks in this fashion. These large blocks of stone were easily stacked, being laid into a bed of mortar with the aid of a hand operated crane. Building walls with stones shaped like oversized bricks was all simple enough, but building the arches was another story.
Walter Sharp’s Simplified Arch Building
To build an arch, wedge-shaped stones are required. Wedge shaped stones, however, are not readily obtained like large brick blocks are. While, due to the nature of limestone, rectangular stones are readily manufactured, making a stone the right shape for an arch usually requires time and effort with a chisel.
Walter Sharp’s work-around to this was to make the angles with mortar. This meant that rectangular stones could be used to make the arches. While Walter Sharp had the faces of his arches cut fairly accurately, using mortar on all of the other angles meant that the amount of stone cutting required besides the basic quarrying was low. The mortar Sharp used was actually quite hard, bordering on concrete.
Basically, Walter Sharp would place the arch stones on the centering, using a small amount of mortar to fill in the gaps at the bottom of the stones, and when all of the stones were in place, his workmen would pour in a mortar-based grout, thereby filling in all of the voids between the arch stones to make the necessary angles. This meant that the time and effort required to build the bridge was low, and, by cutting the joints in the the arch faces precisely, Walter Sharp kept the arch less vulnerable to waterborne debris than it would be otherwise.
One interesting fact to note is that a close look at Walter Sharp’s bridges show the outside faces of the arches are usually quite rough (see the picture of the Floral Bridge above), revealing he did not spend time to smooth the faces. On the other hand, some stone bridges built by other builders (such as C. C. Jamison’s Rock Creek Overflow bridge in Butler County, Kansas or the Thompson Bridge in Cowley County, Kansas) show the tell-tale marks of the toothed chisels used to smooth them off.
Adapting Walter Sharp’s Methods to DIY Projects
For the DIY enthusiast, there is, perhaps, some potential here, at least for building small bridges. The main problem with Walter Sharp’s methods is that the mortar leaches out over the years, tending to weaken the arch. It appears that the mortar used back in those days was non-standardized, with some batches being quite durable and others amazingly weak.
Besides the obvious expedient of using better quality mortar, a simple solution to this mortar loss problem (and one which, incidentally, appears to have been employed by another Cowley County bridge builder – Jerry Hammond) is to add stone fragments with the mortar. This makes the mortar more like concrete in form. Even if the mortar does leach out, the bridge can still stand, the stone fragments making the angles. In fact, this solution provides a much stronger result than using mortar alone, for the stone fragments are bound into the mortar making a concrete.
An alternative would be to actually use concrete. Walter Sharp’s mortar was rather similar in composition to the concrete he used on cement bridges, and, at any rate, was certainly harder than the typical mortar. The thing about concrete is that there is some concern about its effect on stones during freeze and thaw cycles. However, in practice, freeze-thaw cycles seem to have little effect on bridges built this way; at least in the southern Kansas region.
Incidentally, one accepted form of simplified stone wall is the slipform wall where large rocks are poured with concrete into a form. When the concrete sets up, the form is removed revealing a type of stone wall. It would seem that this method of construction is not terribly harder on stones than pouring a runny batch of concrete into the angles of an arch would be.
All in all, Walter Sharp seems to have mastered the compromise between cost and durability, for his simple methods are easily implemented yet last for years.
Stone Arch Bridges 