Dearest Friends, We are going on a journey, one that will take us through time and space. As we walk the same steps I walked, 139 years ago, over the east river, hand in hand. I will confide in you, and introduce you to a world beyond your time, and a home you’ll always remember.
My name is Emily Warren Roebling. I was born in Cold Spring, New York on September 23, 1843. I am a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a friend, an engineer, a lawyer, a humanitarian, a lover, a fighter for women’s rights, a member of Daughters of the American Revolution, and the woman responsible for leading the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
On May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge officially opened. I rode across the new Brooklyn Bridge in an open carriage, carrying a plump rooster to symbolize victory. I was the first person to cross the East River Bridge.
When the Brooklyn Bridge was finally complete, Abram Hewitt called it “an everlasting monument to the self-sacrificing devotion of a woman and of her capacity for that higher education from which she has been too long disbarred… The name of Emily Warren Roebling will…be inseparably associated with all that is admirable in human nature and all that is wonderful in the constructive world of art.”
