The success of the Quincy Fair was phenomenal. The net sum of $30,035.53 was realized and turned over to the directors of the Bunker Hill Monument Association toward the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument. This amount was nearly one quarter its total cost. The Yankee ladies did not know that two contributions of $10,000 each, with several smaller donations, were available by now. The gift of $10,000 by Judah Touro was peculiarly heartening, as an example of the expression of the gratitude of the son of an immigrant to the country of his adoption. The father of Touro had been rabbi of a synagogue in Holland. The younger Touro was born in Newport, R. I., in 1776; he had sailed to New Orleans with an assortment of New England commodities and had made money in their sale. A soldier in the Battle of New Orleans, in the War of 1812, he had been given up for dead in the battle. He had become a millionaire and, learning of the proposed gift of $10,000 by Amos Lawrence, toward the completion of the monument, Touro had matched it. Thus, in the year 1840, the success of the Bunker Hill Monument was assured. It could now be built to the full height planned by Baldwin and Willard—about 220 feet.
The Riggers
Contractor James Sullivan Savage would have no trouble finding good men for the ticklish job of raising and setting the heavy stones of the higher courses of the monument; able sailors, who would take a shore job for a change. Maritime Boston was full of these good riggers, who were used to dizzy heights, and to whom the half hitches, square knots, guys, slings, and tag lines would be easy. Up to this time the monument had been built by day labor, not by contract. Now, Savage had taken a contract to finish the monument for $43,800, from the elevation of 85 feet to the top. He was well trained in masonry, for he had worked on the job since the start under Willard, whose rigid ideas would not let him take a contract himself for profit on such a patriotic project, but who agreed to superintend the work of Savage to the finish. Savage had the traits of a good contractor—energy, resourcefulness, honesty—and the sense that knew how each detail must be executed toward the end of producing a job to be proud of.
Savage replaced the one-horse capstan of the hoist by a six-horsepower steam engine, an innovation that speeded up progress. The steam engine as a prime mover in land and water transportation had become well established, and its use to drive textile machinery had proved successful. Steam power in the construction industry, however, was a novelty. Shouts and wigwag signals from the setting gang at the top to the engineer on the ground were replaced by a bell-wire signaling system. This must have been a pull bell, for many years would pass before electric bells came into common use.[11]
[11] Joseph Henry had developed the electromagnet at about the time of the laying of the lower courses of the monument, and, a few months after its dedication, Morse would operate the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore, but the transmission of electric currents by insulated wires even for a few score feet was still too new to receive serious attention on a construction job.
As its lighter stones would be easier to handle, the granite inner cone (newel) around which the stairs wind was erected a few courses ahead of the walls of the monument. It thus served as a support for the derrick which raised the heavier wall stones. Through apertures in the hollow walls of the newel, a heavy beam (wood?) was passed, upon which the derrick was set.
It is interesting to compare our modern hoisting derrick with the apparatus used to raise the stones for the monument. The derrick of today consists of a guyed, vertical mast, an adjustable boom hinged to the base of the mast, with boom falls, and hoist falls, each with their cables and pulleys, or blocks. At the base of the mast, a bull ring serves to turn the mast by power. The whole combination is called the derrick. When we get accustomed to the old English or American custom of calling the mast the post or derrick, and the boom either the gaff or derrick, a little study enables us to comprehend how the monument was built.
The lower courses were raised by the “Holmes Hoisting Apparatus,” designed by a practical seaman of Boston. This device could command a circle 100 feet in diameter. Except that it had no bull ring to turn the mast, it appears much like the derrick of today. With steam power available for the upper courses, Savage seems to have modified the boom of Holmes to serve as a nearly horizontal “lever,” on which a “wheel carriage” drew the stone inward, to its desired position for placement. In other words, apparently, the boom became today’s monorail. A somewhat obscure, English description of the means used to hoist masonry 100 years ago, tells of two devices. One was a “movable derrick crane,” with a vertical post, supported by two timber backstays, and a movable hinged “jib or derrick,” which could be today’s boom. This assembly, of course, corresponded to today’s stiff-leg derrick, in which the back guys are replaced by timber members. The other English device for raising stones was practically exactly like today’s traveling crane, and that was the name it went by in England, 100 years ago.
Our construction forebears of over a century ago had to use ropes and chains for all purposes; there were no wire ropes. About the time Savage set his first stone, John A. Roebling was making the first American wire rope cable, in a largely outdoor plant located on a level meadow on his farm in Saxonburg, Pa. Wire rope had real advantages in construction work, because of its superior strength and its much less stretch under load. A crude sketch, dated 1837, shows that the derrick for the monument was guyed by chains, which attached to the top of the mast and passed over timber brackets at the staging level, and thence vertically down to weights at the ground. In his long length, the stretching and shrinking of a rope under rain, load, and temperature changes would be difficult to control.
Every four courses of the wall stones (about 11 feet) the derrick was raised, perhaps by unshipping the boom and using it as a lesser mast to raise the mast proper. Square timber sticks were then beginning to be used for staging, instead of the round trunks of small trees and saplings previously used. A sketch of the monument shows a squared timber stage for pointing the joints. Such a stage could be much more easily erected, and was more reliable than the round sticks, tied at the joints by cords.