Prior to—and largely after—her involvement in building the Brooklyn Bridge, Emily Warren Roebling (1842 – 1903) was best known as a club woman. In 1900, for example, Roebling received numerous mentions in the magazine of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, but just two referenced her work on the Brooklyn Bridge. One referred to the incapacitation of her husband, the bridge’s chief engineer, before writing, “He was able…to instruct Mrs. Roebling and she completed his plans so well that it was said, ‘His work was hardly missed, so magnificently was it done by his wife.’”

Col. Washington A. Roebling, a civil war veteran, had been appointed the project’s chief engineer in 1869 when his father John A. Roebling died after contracting tetanus during his work on the bridge. Washington Roebling was prepared for the position; he had studied caisson foundations in Europe and also worked closely with his father, who had considered his son indispensable to his work.

Like his father, Roebling also suffered from his time on the Brooklyn Bridge. In 1870 or 1871, he became partially paralyzed, mute, deaf, and blind. These ailments are now believed to be the result of a decompression illness caused by his time directing workers in the caissons underwater. Col. Roebling was never able to return to the bridge’s site. Work continued without him until the bridge was completed in 1883.

During many of those years, Col. Roebling watched construction progress through a telescope at the bay window of his Brooklyn Heights house. “He has been greatly assisted by his wife, whose acquaintance with the whole vast work is minute and accurate,” a profile of Col. Roebling mentioned in passing. While Emily Roebling had accompanied her husband on his European tour to study caisson foundations, she did not have any formal training as an engineer.

*New York from under Brooklyn Bridge, c. 1903 (Detroit Publishing).*

By the time the Brooklyn Bridge opened, Emily Roebling had acquired enough knowledge to sit down with steel mill manufacturers planning to bid on the steel and iron work and, “by her knowledge of engineering helped them out with their patterns and cleared away difficulties that had for weeks been puzzling their brains,” the New York Times reported. She also oversaw contracts and negotiated for building materials.

In addition to her technical knowledge, Emily Roebling also possessed people skills, communicating with the board of trustees and convincing Brooklyn’s mayor to keep her husband on the job. “[B]ut for me the Brooklyn Bridge would never have had the name Roebling in any way connected with it!” she wrote to her son in 1898.

While public attention to her role was slight at the time, Emily Roebling did have the official honor of being the first person to cross the bridge. An 1883 book reported, “Mrs. Roebling was the first to drive over the Bridge, and found that no perceptible vibration was occasioned by the trotting of her horse.”

A more recent New York Times article reported that Emily Roebling later studied law at New York University and went on to argue for equality in marriage in a law journal. Roebling died of stomach cancer at her home in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1903.