(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — It happened 150 years ago this week, on May 4, 1873, in Dixon. During a baptism celebration in the Rock River, the Truesdell Bridge collapsed with an estimated 200 people standing on the bridge to watch the ritual.
The disaster resulted in the death of 46 people, and another 56 people were injured.
To this day, it’s one of the worst bridge collapses in U.S. history.
Tom Wadsworth has studied the collapse. His great-grandmother, Gertie Wadsworth, was on the bridge — in her grandmother’s arms — on the day it failed.
Wadsworth family lore holds that, as Gertie’s grandmother fell to her death, she managed to toss the 3-and-a-half-year-old into the river. Gertie landed far enough away from the failing bridge that she was able to be rescued downstream.
“It's not as though the bridge just collapsed and went straight down,” said Tom Wadsworth, who’s now 70. “It turns over on top of these people. ... As the [Chicago] Tribune said, the truss ‘fell over with the weight and imprisoned the doomed in an iron cage with which they sunk, and from which there was no escape.’”
Wadsworth said Rev. J.H. Pratt, who had been leading the baptism, was wracked by guilt after the collapse, but Wadsworth said Pratt was a hero.
“He started grabbing them by the hair and by the shoulder and by the pants,” he said. “He knew what the riverbed was like. He’d walked out there many times for baptism ceremonies, so he knew how far he could get and grab people, and he got 10 or 15 himself.”
Wadsworth has helped organize a memorial, which will be dedicated at the river on May 7.
(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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