![]() While Walter Sharp had the faces of his arches cut fairly accurately, using mortar on all of the other angles meant that the amount of stone cutting required besides the basic quarrying was low. This meant that rectangular stones could be used to make the arches. Walter Sharp’s work-around to this was to make the angles with mortar. While, due to the nature of limestone, rectangular stones are readily manufactured, making a stone the right shape for an arch usually requires time and effort with a chisel. Wedge shaped stones, however, are not readily obtained like large brick blocks are. To build an arch, wedge-shaped stones are required. Building walls with stones shaped like oversized bricks was all simple enough, but building the arches was another story. These large blocks of stone were easily stacked, being laid into a bed of mortar with the aid of a hand operated crane. ![]() ![]() Since the stones were limestone, they could be cut very simply into massive, brick-like blocks in this fashion. Granted, the spandrel walls of the bridges were pretty simple to build the stones were usually quarried out of hillsides with feathers-and-wedges. To be sure, these local farmers often had little stone masonry training, but they were shown what to do, and with what success needs only to be determined by looking at Walter Sharp’s bridges. These structures were built with a degree of pride, often by the very people who would use them the most. This practice kept his costs down and made his bridges rather popular projects locally. Rather than hire a team of professional masons, Walter Sharp hired local people - usually farmers - to build his bridges. One factor that played into Walter Sharp’s competitive bridge prices was the fact that he used local labor. The Secret to Walter Sharp’s Success: Local Labor And it would appear that other builders of Cowley’s bridges more or less adapted Sharp’s methods. Walter Sharp was responsible for most (though not all) of the famous Cowley County stone arch bridges, including this one over Timber Creek near Floral. Stone arch bridges could be fantastically expensive (as an example, the famous Clements Bridge in Chase County, Kansas, was triple the cost of the largest stone arch bridge in the state - the Dunkard Mill Bridge, which Walter Sharp built.) However, whereas some stone arch bridges were quite expensive, Walter Sharp’s pricing proved to be but slightly more expensive than the cost of a steel bridge, and his stone bridges lasted much longer with much less maintenance than a steel bridge could. The Cowley commissioners were apparently already aware of the permanence of stone arch bridges, but did not know of anyone who could build them at a cost they could afford. Cowley County needed permanent bridges at affordable costs, and Walter Sharp provided them. While in Kansas Walter Sharp was already well known in Marion, Chase, Greenwood, and Butler counties, it was in Cowley County where he really rose to fame. And, unlike bridges built by other builders, Walter Sharp’s bridges rarely failed - surviving time and floods much better than wooden or even iron truss bridges did. ![]() He quickly rose to prominence, as his highly competitive pricing allowed him to win numerous contracts. Walter Sharp seemingly appeared out of nowhere early on in Kansas’s years of stone arch bridge building. While primarily building in Kansas, he also built several stone arch bridges in other places, such as New Mexico. Perhaps one of the most well-known individual stone arch bridge builders is Walter Sharp. ![]()
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