One man, one drafting table, thirteen arches

Walter Hall Wheeler designed a bridge that was, for a time, the longest of its kind in the world. He did most of it the way he did everything in his career: alone, out of a Minneapolis office he ran largely single-handedly from 1912 to 1968. Where the engineers of his era built partnerships, Wheeler kept his own drafting table and took on commissions that would have tested firms many times his size.

Wheeler came to the work from Potsdam, New York, where he was born in 1883. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1906 with a degree in mining engineering, turned to structural work early, and by 1912 had opened the practice he would run for the next fifty-six years.

The Mendota Bridge

From 1923 to 1927, Wheeler served as consulting engineer for Hennepin County, and his charge became the work that defined him. Collaborating with C.A.P. Turner, one of the country’s foremost concrete engineers, Wheeler designed a structure of thirteen reinforced-concrete arches carrying the highway about 120 feet above the Minnesota River valley. When the Mendota Bridge opened on November 8, 1926, it was the longest continuous concrete-arch bridge in the world.

The opening matched the scale of the achievement. President Calvin Coolidge sent a telegram. Governor Theodore Christianson cut golden ropes to open the deck, and two caravans of some 15,000 cars met at the center of the span. The bridge was dedicated to the Gopher Gunners of the 151st Field Artillery, the Minnesota soldiers who died in the First World War. It still carries State Highway 55 today.

The Mendota Bridge by the Numbers

“The Mendota Bridge Under Construction – A Pier,” 1925. Apparently photographed by Wheeler himself. Hennepin County Library, donated by the Star and Tribune Company.

Beyond the bridge

Wheeler’s reputation rested on more than a single span. He held a patent for a reinforced-concrete flat-slab system, a method that let thin concrete floors and ceilings span widely spaced columns without deep supporting beams. The Minneapolis Armory, built in 1935 and 1936 and still standing downtown, used his approach to roof one of the largest column-free interiors in the city. The work placed him in the front rank of Minnesota’s reinforced-concrete engineers, alongside Turner and the generation that made this state a center of the discipline.

His project files, preserved at the University of Minnesota, run from 1912 to 1968 and reach well beyond bridges: Pioneer Hall at the University of Minnesota, the Fort Snelling Chapel, the Palo Alto City Hall in California, and commercial landmarks such as the Cream of Wheat Building. He was still designing bridges into his late seventies. In 1962 he engineered a skewed railroad bridge over U.S. Highway 61 near Two Harbors, solving a tight track curve with angled spans and piers. In 1968 he formed the firm of Wheeler & Tillitt and retired the same year.

Wheeler died in 1974. His papers, including family records reaching back to 1829, are held in the Northwest Architectural Archives at the University of Minnesota. He led ACEC Minnesota as president for the 1953–54 term. His monument, the Mendota Bridge, remains in service nearly a century after he designed it.

Sources & further reading

Walter Hall Wheeler Papers (N28), Northwest Architectural Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries
MnDOT Historic Bridges, Fort Snelling–Mendota Bridge (Bridge 4190)
Dakota County Historical Society, Mendota Bridge
MnDOT Historic Bridges, Two Harbors Railroad Bridge (Bridge 38001)