it does look promising doesn't it. Although the fact that this is a drawing, possibly drawn after the fact and adding and missing details, and isn't to scale it may be a coincidence. It would be awesome if it was the actual fjord of the river though wouldn't it?

That's pretty darn cool. It is going to be a bit more difficult for you in this case as the working objective is an illustration, which is subject to all sorts of artistic interpretations, omissions, and distortions.

I'm particularly curious to know how you got the illustration to blink on and off because that's really trick.

I hope you can find a period photograph at some point and do the same thing.

Excellent work,

Richard

Dwarmour you beat me by 44 seconds! LOL.

I just saw that as well, haha

The illustrator was William Waud. Originally, he was an architect from England. He and his brother came to the states in the 1850s. His brother Alfred is considered the best of all the Civil war illustrators probably because of his large number of works. William is also probably in the top 3 or 4 of illustrators from that period and we know his work was accurate as can be seen in the drawing he made of the S.C. State capitol building in 1865. The Library of Congress has the original pontoon crossing drawing online and it includes all the important information that you would need for this Prince’s Principle. Harper’s Weekly Magazine did have a set of artists that would always touch these up but, in this case, they didn’t change the dimensions or add anything so I think accuracy must have been a high priority. As a historian told me, it was really impossible to carry a camera and film through all the rough things these civil war guys had to go through and the exposure time for film was several minutes so you couldn’t take pictures of combat or any scenes with action. Also, in the south, the supplies needed for developing photographs was not available during and shortly after the war so there are almost no photographs from this area during that time.

In all honesty, you could probably make this illustration fit at many places along this river but one key thing that makes our site unique is the fact that, before the canal was built in 1891, there was an island here that ended just below where the bridge landed (this can be seen in the Waud drawing). The maps.live.com birds eye view (below) of our location also shows where the man-made canal embankment (sidewalk on top) is the only thing that really separates the canal from the river just below where a bridge from our abutment would have crossed. I think this marks the spot where the island ended and Waud shows this same thing in his drawing. On the abutment side of the river, we also have a ravine whose bottom lies about at the position where the pontoon bridge lies. This is shown in the Waud drawing and it also lines up correctly when doing Prince’s Principle.

The animated GIF is a Photoshop Elements feature when you do the “Save as Web” and change the default file type from JPG to GIF and select “animate”. It will take each layer of your photoshop image and make it a frame in the animated GIF. In my case, I made one layer have just today’s photo and then a second layer that had the overlay of the Waud drawing onto today’s photo. You also need to change the frame rate to something slow like 4 seconds in my case.

Below is the birdseye view of our site that I did earlier in the week. The red line is where a bridge would have crossed perpendicular to the river our abutment. The green line is where I estimated the pontoon would have crossed but Prince’s Principle showed this to be in a little bit different position.

Well, it's pretty cool. I have Photoshop 6.0, I dont think it can do that; at least I couldnt get it to do that. I'll keep digging through it.

Cheers

Very cool animation.

I notice the power line running thru the area. Would there have been a cultural resource inventory conducted in connection with the construction of the power line that may have some research information someone years ago may have unearthed regarding the bridge?

Also, I noticed in the birdseye photo along the red line, there appears to be a linear line of rubble or rock. Am I imaging that? Was that photo taken from a plane?

I never knew that one could do that with Photoshop. Which version did you use? Just goes to show the range of tools we all could add to our toolboxes. Very cool.

You must keep us posted on the progress of the research. Very interesting and enlightening stuff indeed.

Scott

One more thing......in the birdseye photo, where would the island have been located in relation to what is shown?

Scott

Power lines have been in this location since about 1900. The last road here (to be found on a map) was about 1903 so I think the power lines are here because this was an old crossing point for a road. Checking with the power company about the history of these lines has always been on my to-do list.

I think the line of rubble you think you see is just a distortion around the red line from when I saved the photo as a jpeg. I did notice from the Prince's Principle image, that there are a few places where rocks appear where the piers were drawn. I have an underwater video camera that I wanted to used in this area but I tried it a couple of times last Spring and it was a lot more difficult to do than I expected. I did get some nice video of the different kinds of fish we have here :P

Believe it or not, the photo is from a satellite. You can choose from 4 different angles. Unlike other satellite images, this gives you an angle such that you can actually see the front door of your house. It's really cool. Everyone should check this out. It is at maps.live.com which is a Microsoft site. Just enter your address. It will first show a road image and then you should select the "Bird's Eye" view which appears in the upper left corner toolbar of the map. You can then select the rotate functions from the upper left toolbar to rotate your view. The images from this are outstanding.

I used Photoshop Elements 5 to make the animated GIF. I don't have the full version of Photoshop but I would be surprised if this feature is not there. Maybe if you save the image as GIF, there will be an option for "animated".

As far as where the island is, if you look at the birds-eye view, it would end just to the right of the red line where the power lines cross in the area between the river and the canal. In fact, you can see some water standing in this area and it fills up more when the river is high. We know from Civil War accounts of the Union Army, that the river was higher than normal when the pontoon bridge was built. Considering this and then taking away the canal embankment (which was not there in 1865), I think this would have been a large opening like that shown in the Waud drawing.

When I compare the photo you used as background for the gif overlay, and the illustration on page one it seems to me that if you rotated the perspective of the photo 4 to 7 degrees clockwise (that is, shoot it again but move the camera 4 to 7 degrees counterclockwise from the same shooting position) things might fit a bit better. I was noting in particular that embayment in the background of the illustration and the inlet to that feature, and most notably the knolls that encompass each side of the inlet.

In your original postings you had images of some old roads in relationship to the bridge abutment.....where are these located in relation to the red line on the sat image?

Scott

I was just looking at sat images of the road on the other side of the river. It appears that this old road ends just above where the pontoon bridge falls with Prince's Principle. Before the large canal was built in 1891, there was only about a 8-10 foot wide channel of water between this island and the other side of the river. The Waud drawing clearly shows a house just on the other side of the river across from the pontoon crossing. I have another drawing of Sherman's crossing from the other side of the river and it shows the men crossing this smaller channel of water on a very simple bridge. I think this drawing may have been made from the house. So the bridge that was burned only spanned the main portion of the river and then you had to move slightly upriver (on the island) to get to this smaller bridge. If I have time today, I'm going to go to the other side and check out where Prince's Principle placed the house. It looks like it sits right where that road ends. Last year when I inspected this area, I found a few blocks of what appeared to be really old concrete. I would like to get some more photos of this. Is it possible that something like concrete could have been in use in 1865? I'll let you know what I find and post some more pictures after I visit this spot again. Later on this year, a developer is going to start building in this area. They have donated the low lying area to the city for a river-walk but the area where this old road is will probably be cleared and developed. So, time is running out.

The Romans had a concrete that would set-up underwater, and a concrete that is still extant.

Here's a couple of links to browse through:

http://www.cement.org/ (The Portland Cement Association)

and

http://matse1.mse.uiuc.edu/concrete/hist.html (A history time line)

I havent vetted the time line so research and corroboration will be needed.

Thanks FireArch. From those sources, it looks like concrete may well have been in use at that time. I couldn't get to the site today. Looks like some work may have already begun on the development. Anyway, below is a photo I took last year of one of the concrete blocks. You can see some gravel in the end of it. There are no records of any buildings at this site during modern times but I can see (in other areas) where people have dumped things here over the years so I'm not sure if this could be part of that old house or not.

With respect to concrete I'm sure there is going to be much regional variation. That said, in my area concrete with round aggregate (not crushed) predates circa 1930. The composition and ratio of sand, aggregate (size, type, and condition), and cementing agent (Portland is only one of the types) may help you identify the time frame for that block.