Bridge by bridge with Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello

Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge by Bridge: Volume 2: Minnesota
by Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello

 

When an elementary school art teacher in Davenport, Iowa instructed her fifth grade students to study and sketch the local Mississippi River bridges one semester, probably neither the teacher nor her students nor anyone else had any inkling that a decades-long labor of love was about to begin. 

Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello’s fascination with the Mississippi River and especially its hundreds of bridges continued after her fifth graders’ study unit ended.   A few years later when she took early retirement, Costello gathered up her sketchbooks and art supplies and a camera and embarked on a quest:  to sketch every bridge across the Mississippi River, from the Louisiana delta all the way north to the headwaters in Lake Itasca.

During the course of her many trips  south and north from her Iowa home, Costello not only sketched the bridges but also collected as much information about them as she could. She spoke to engineers, DOT personnel, bridge designers, construction workers, railroad administrators, bridge-tenders, historians, and citizens who lived along the river.  She wrote down bridge histories from newspaper articles, railroad companies, the Coast Guard, and the Army Corps of Engineers.

In 1995, nearly twenty years after Costello set out on her expedition of discovery, the first of two volumes of her artwork was published:

Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge By Bridge, Volume 1(from Louisiana to Minnesota)

Seven years later, in 2002 Volume 2 was published, containing sketches of all 135 of Minnesota’s Mississippi River bridges. 

By coincidence, Mister Tild checked out Volume 2 from the Eden Prairie Library about a week before the I-35W bridge collapsed.    In the weeks after the collapse,  when it came time to either return the book to the library or renew it, we finally realized what we had in Costello’s comprehensive compendium of bridge information. We turned to the entry for ”Bridge 39″,  ie: Minnesota’s 39th bridge across the Mississippi as you travel north from the Iowa border:

For each of the 135 bridges in Volume 2, Costello has included a paragraph or two of background information.  It’s impossible to miss the irony in the last lines about Bridge 39:

  

Oddly, in the aftermath of the bridge collapse there’s been no sudden spike of interest in these books.  When I looked in the Hennepin County Library catalog last week, most of the 14 copies of Volume 2 that are in the system were checked in.  

The fruits of Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello’s labor of love have been widely praised by historians, bridge designers and engineers.  Both volumes of Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge By Bridge are cited often in Wikipedia entries and other reference works.  Complete with a glossary of bridge terms, descriptions  and diagrams of different types of bridges, these volumes are essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about our bridges’ past, present, and possible futures.

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