A Treasure Hidden in Plain Sight: The Smith Ransome Japanese Bridge
A Talk at Union Chapel in the Grove, Shelter Island, NY. July 7, 2019
2019 David Lichtenstein
(Presentation Draft—not for Publication)
It is often the things that strike us as odd or unusual that in fact can tell us the most about the history of people’s lives. While I’m sure that there are many lessons that can be learned from the ordinary and the everyday, sometimes it is the extraordinary, the oddity, the anomaly that speaks to us most clearly about the past.
Why is it there? How did it come about? And what were they up to in making such a thing? A footbridge on the south coast of our island is just such an anomaly. It is also the surviving record of some very interesting and imaginative people and of a singular moment in the history of this nation as well as this Island.
The Japanese Bridge located just behind the beach in Smith Cove is a structure that can charm us not only because of its beauty and grace and the extraordinary engineering that went into its construction over 100 years ago, but also because of the stories that surround its coming to be: how it got there, how it has survived, and how it is now the focus of a restoration and preservation effort.
Perhaps because it is an island, people often come to Shelter Island looking for something. Often they find something else, something that they didn’t even know that they were looking for. And indeed sometimes they create things. But things don’t get invented unless you are looking for something in the first place. The bridge is very much at the center of such stories: of people coming here, looking for something and then creating something else.
But first I’ll tell you about the design and engineering. The bridge is a footbridge about 60’ long and built over a man-made lagoon. The lagoon itself is fascinating—it was a common salt marsh or creek as we see all over our Island, but the designer in this instance installed sea gates that could trap the water at high tide and keep the lagoon full.
The design of the bridge that arches over this lagoon follows the concept that is known in both Japan and China as a Moon or Drum Bridge: a ‘Taiko Bashi’ in Japanese. The reason for this name is that it is shaped as a half circle or half-moon and built over a reflecting pool so that when the light is right the reflection fills out the half-circle and a full moon shape appears instead. The bridges are often found in Japanese tea gardens and are generally made out of wood. Ours instead is made out of steel reinforced concrete. It is probably the first moon bridge ever made in this way. That it is still standing and usable as a foot bridge after over 100 years near the sea and salt water, surviving both hurricanes like that of 1938 and Shelter Island winters is an engineering marvel.
Tea Gardens are designed to promote contemplation and reflection. The Moon Bridge engenders reflection in both the literal and the figurative sense. There is the literal reflection of the half-circle in the pool, but it is also true that when you walk over a moon bridge the steepness of the arch causes you to pause at the top. It is a little bit of a climb to get over it and invariably when you get to the crest of the span, you stop and reflect. I crossed our moon bridge with Jay Sterling a few days ago and that very thing happened as we reached its crest.
How did this reflective moon bridge come about on the beach at Shelter Island?
There is a famous example of such a bridge in the tea garden of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. It was built there as part of an international fair in 1894. That is 10 years or so before our bridge was built. And indeed, the designer of our bridge was living in the San Francisco Bay area at the time. He was an active architect and designer and there is no reason to doubt that he saw the ‘Taiko Bashi’ in Golden Gate Park which designed by Nakatani, an important Japanese architect.
The architect who designed our bridge was Ernest Ransome. Ransome was born in England and in his 20’s moved to San Francisco where a building boom had started after the discovery of gold. In a fascinating twist in this story Ransome came from a family that had long been in the steel industry in Ipswich England. However, his father Frederick Ransome got involved in creating an artificial sandstone which was pretty much replaced by the development then of what we know as Portland cement and modern concrete. So, our designer Ernest Ransome was formed by two industries: steel and concrete. What happened in the years after he arrived in California as a young man is that the idea of combining steel and concrete in what we now know as reinforced concrete was just being invented. Ransome experimented with the steel bars and came up with the idea that if they were twisted like a candy licorice, they would hold the concrete better. He patented this idea, it proved to be highly successful and the Ransome Method of reinforced concrete became the standard. Our bridge in South Ferry Hills is made of reinforced concrete in the Ransome Method and indeed is only one of two known bridges designed by Ransome and still standing.
He had built a bridge in Golden Gate Park, the Alvord Lake Bridge, in the 1880’s using reinforced concrete. It is the first ever built that way and is still standing. Ours is a probably the second ever built and indeed is the only other example of a Ransome reinforced concrete bridge still standing.
So now we know something of the design and engineering of the bridge and have met our first character, the architect and designer Ernest Ransome. How did this Englishman living and working in the Bay Area come to build this bridge on Shelter Island? The other players in the story of course are Francis Marion Smith and his wives: Mary Thompson and then after she died, Evelyn Kate Ellis Smith. Remember, Smith’s Cove was once Clark’s Cove, but the impact of the Smiths estate there was such that the name of the harbor was changed.
The whole story of Francis Marion Smith is more than I can tell this morning and indeed perhaps many of you know something about it. He was known as the Borax King because he was responsible for creating the product that we now think of as an everyday household cleaner. It wasn’t always. Borax is a salt of Boron a relatively rare element that was known for centuries but was always too rare and expensive for anything beyond the most limited use. Frank Smith not only found the most extensive natural deposits on earth but figured out a way to mine them and get them first to the railroad then to a refinery, then to markets at a price that made the product easily affordable to everyone. It became a household cleaner and laundry detergent.
While in his 20’s Francis Smith left his home in Wisconsin and made his way to the mining camps of Nevada. In 1872 he discovered a deposit of boron salts in a remote part of the Nevada desert known as Teel’s Marsh. He developed a way to mine it and then transport it to the rail road line by means of a 20 mule team pulling wagons. Hence the brand 20 mule team borax was created as was a market for what had always been considered a rare and overly expensive mineral for anything like household use. He made a great deal of money from Borax and then invested in real estate and transportation systems in the rapidly developing San Francisco Bay Area. Here let me introduce a secondary character in the story of the bridge. Frank’s partner in Real Estate and development in San Francisco was a man name Frank Havens, a name that should strike your ears for indeed he was a member of the old Shelter Island family of that name who had gone to California. No doubt Frank heard of Shelter Island from him.
In the 1880’s when Frank Smith built refineries in California and in New Jersey he turned to Ernest Ransome and had him design and build what were the first reinforced concrete factories in the United States. It was a radical departure, an extraordinary step in architecture and engneering. No one was building factories that way. In the 1890’s a major industrial fire swept through Bayonne New Jersey where the Borax refineries were, the only buildings that survived were Ransome’s reinforced concrete structures. This building style was put on the map and has become a standard mode of construction for all buildings ever since.
So, when Mollie Thompson Smith, Frank’s first wife, wanted to develop the lagoon on the Shelter Island property known as Presdeleau (near the water) they had Ransome design the bridge and the bulkheads surrounding it. Unlike wooden bulkhead, which are the standard means of construction here in the Northeast, these concrete bulkheads are curved and graceful. And they are still standing 100 years after construction. They are unique and an engineering treasure in their own right.
Mollie Thompson Smith was herself a formidable woman and deeply involved in designing and developing their grand estates in Oakland and on Shelter Island. Although she couldn’t have children, she established a major charitable organization in the Bay Area to aid orphaned girls and she took several girls into the Smith household as members of the family. Mollie was from Brooklyn and her family was still in the east and thus the establishment of a Shelter Island home here in 1890’s when other Brooklyn families began summering here was also, no doubt, very important to her. During the 17 years that she was a summer resident here, she was extremely active in fundraising on the island, including a number of events at this chapel.
One of the girls that Mollie took in was Evelyn Kate Elis, who became her secretary. When Mollie had a heart attack in 1904 and it looked like her health was failing, she remarked that Frank should marry Evelyn if she (Mollie) were to die. And so it happened. Mollie passed in 1905, which is just around the time the bridge was being constructed. I doubt that she saw its completion.
In 1907, Frank and Evelyn Kate Ellis were wed and by 1913, they had four children. Kate Frank and the children continued to use the Estate as a summer home through the 1920’s and until Frank’s death in 1931.
Although three of the children settled in the West and started lives and families there. Dorothy the second child, stayed east got married to George Bayley here and had a house on Smith Cove through the 1990’s. Dorothy also established a family foundation known as the Teel’s Marsh foundation—after Franks’ original mining claim. It was Dorothy’s sun Bob Bayley and granddaughter Katy Braiewa who got in touch with the SI Historical Society in 2017 to ask about efforts to list the bridge on the NY State and national Registers of Historic Places and to offer their personal help and some support from the Teel’s Marsh Foundation.
The South Ferry Hills Association a group of 60 or so Shelter Island residents owns the bridge and the surrounding beach. It had just completed a major restoration of a wooden bulkhead that now feeds the lagoon from the east. We know the bridge was in need of repairs and restoration. It had been patched and repaired at least twice, once in the 1980’s and once again in the mid 1990’s. But it was clear that a more substantial restoration project was needed if the bridge was going to survive the next 100 years. I am happy to report that the initial engineering reports are that the bridge can be saved and restored. It will be a fascinating project in terms of both the chemistry of materials and the structural engineering that went into this early design and use of reinforced concrete,
The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Francis Marion Smith and Evelyn Kate Ellis joined together with members of the South Ferry Hills Community (including Chip Whipple, board President, and Tom Cugliani) and other interested Shelter Island residents (including former Supv. Jim Dougherty and Beth Swanstrom) to successfully apply to have the bridge listed on the State and National Register, something we completed just last year (1918). We then created, with the invaluable help of Ed Shillingburg, the Smith-Ransome Japanese Bridge Conservancy, a 501(c3) charitable corporation and have begun raising money to first study the project and to eventually fully restore and preserve this inspiring and historic structure.
You can see the bridge easily from the water in Smith Cove and we will be setting up visiting days so all interested people can visit this moon bridge for their education and reflection.
Our new website is srjbc.org/
The Shelter Island Reporter recently featured an article on the bridge that you can find