History

In 1892 Francis Marion Smith of Oakland, CA, owner of the Pacific Coast Borax Company, and his wife, the former Mary Thompson Wright of NY, purchased land on Shelter Island and began to establish the estate that would be known as Presdeleau. As its name suggests it was located near the water, on the south side of the Island overlooking a small bay known at the time as Clark’s Cove, now Smith Cove.

Several years before acquiring the Shelter Island property, F.M. Smith had commissioned the inventor and architect Ernest Ransome to design and build a factory for The Pacific Coast Borax Co.  in West Alameda, California.  Ransome had been experimenting with a construction system using twisted iron rods encased in poured concrete and in 1886 had designed the first ferro-concrete structure to be built in the United States.  Ransome also designed two underpass bridges including the Alvord Lake Bridge (on the National Register) which is still standing in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco and is the first bridge built in the United States using this construction technique.  Reinforced concrete has since become a standard construction practice in the United States and around the world.

In the mid 1990’s, Smith invited Ransome to come to his new Shelter Island property to design and build a lagoon with reinforced concrete walls, tidal gates for maintaining the lagoon’s depth at low tide, and a graceful closed-spandrel arched bridge in the Japanese style. The “Japanese Bridge” as it has come to be known is thus among the earliest ferro-concrete structures ever built and is perhaps the most graceful bridge of the early structures. It is also set in a uniquely designed lagoon that continues to be used as a boat basin by the residents of this community on Shelter Island.

According to the website bridgehunter.com:  This bridge is highly significant as one of only two known surviving bridges built by Ernest L. Ransome, a pioneer in reinforced concrete construction.

The bridge is still in active use as a foot bridge.  Many of the original bulkheads and seawalls constructed by Ernest Ransome for this lagoon on the Smith Estate over a hundred years ago are also still intact. They are now the property of The South Ferry Hills Homeowners Association and are enjoyed by its members and visitors.

Ernest L. Ransome

Ernest L. Ransome is a very significant figure in the history of structural engineering in the reinforced concrete world. His innovations were used by many other engineers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and adapted to increase the range and variety of structures that could be built using reinforced concrete. In the United States in late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, there was a construction boom related to building cities and capitals throughout the country. Engineers of the period were studying materials and techniques with which to build the structure in an efficient way, while keeping the costs for the builder reasonable. New materials were introduced to replace more expensive material that could be rapidly installed on the new structure (e.g., as a substitute for stone, mass produced cast iron and terra cotta were used for facades). As cities grew, the desire for larger, taller, buildings spurred the development of completely new structural systems. The developments progressed from cast/wrought iron, to steel in a short period of time, learning from prior mistakes to improve upon safety. In the late nineteenth century, when all new commercial and public buildings were built with a steel frame clad in stone or substitute stone, Ransome felt that concrete could also become a useful system for construction. When he first shared his designs with his colleagues, a few welcomed his innovation, while others were less enthusiastic.  He spoke at a gathering of architects in 1901 in Chicago and the following is a quote from the 1910 book, A Half Century of Chicago Building:

“His [Ransome’s] description awakened some of the local architects to the comparatively unknown construction. Some were ready to grasp its importance and at once apply themselves to the study, the investigation and the application of the new medium. They were considered with pity and looked upon as cranks and harmless experimenters. The others were very skeptical and did not consider the new style of work as useful.”

Needless to say, Ransome persisted, obtained many patents, including the reinforcing bars that were used in the Japanese Bridge. The result: reinforced concrete became an alternate to steel framed construction for both bridges and buildings.