It was not customary for a woman to accompany a man to a construction site in the late 19th century … But when Washington A. Roebling, the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, fell ill, it was his wife, Emily Warren Roebling, who stepped in — managing, liaising, and politicking between city officials, workers, and her husband’s bedside to see the world’s first steel-wire suspension bridge to completion.

Roebling never held any official title, and thus went overlooked in official records, but her contributions were clear to everyone around her at the time, and have, in the course of time, come to be properly acknowledged in both scholarly accounts and public memory.

New York’s “paper of record” missed Roebling’s death in 1903, but the Brooklyn Daily Eagle did not, publishing a long, laudatory obituary and a photo the day after she died at home in Trenton, New Jersey. The Eagle dutifully described “the part which she took in superintending the building of the Brooklyn Bridge” as Roebling’s “chief claim to fame.” However, it also described her as “one of the best known club women in the country” and cited her “prominence among the women of the country in all movements which looked toward the so-called emancipation of the sex

Emily Warren was born in 1843 to a prominent family in Cold Spring, New York. Her father, Sylvanus, was a New York State Assemblyman, and her brother, Gouverneur K. Warren, was a West Point graduate and civil engineer. Thirteen years her senior, Gouverneur helped fund Emily’s tuition at the Georgetown Visitation Convent, an elite preparatory school for girls, and after he led the successful defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg during the Civil War, he invited Emily to join him and some of his officers in camp. There, she met Col. Washington Roebling. The two quickly fell in love (their romance is captured in their letters, archived at the Brooklyn Historical Society), and were married in 1864, when Emily was just 21 years old.

After the war, Washington and Emily embarked on a European honeymoon, with a twist. Washington’s father, John Augustus Roebling, was a wire manufacturer and the world’s leading architect of suspension bridges. In 1867, he was commissioned to build a bridge spanning the East River between New York City and Brooklyn. Not only would such a bridge have to be the longest ever built, but it would have to sail over one of the busiest ports in the world.

While in Europe, the young couple visited construction sites to learn of the latest engineering techniques, including the use of “caissons” – pressurized watertight chambers – to build underwater foundations. Washington planned to work alongside his father, but the elder Roebling contracted tetanus during a construction accident in 1869 and died less than a month later. All of a sudden, at the age of 32, Washington A. Roebling became the Chief Engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Like his father, Washington was a hands-on engineer, and he joined his workers in the caissons that sank below the East River to create stable foundations for the bridge’s towers. At the time, the dangers of working under compression were not understood, and Washington, like many others, was stricken with “caisson’s disease,” known today as decompression sickness or “the bends.”

This part of Emily Warren Roebling’s story is well known, despite the fact that she herself worked carefully to keep the extent of her husband’s illness, and her involvement in the project, a secret (in part because the Mayor of Brooklyn, Seth Low, sought to replace Washington with a friend in 1881). However, Roebling’s constant presence at the construction site, board meetings, and all other functions could not be ignored. By the end of the project, as David McCullough wrote in The Great Bridge, E. F. Farrington, the chief wire engineer on site, was referring to Roebling as “the first female field engineer” and announcing to audiences at the Cooper Union that he spoke from her notes.

She was the first to cross the completed roadway when it was ready, and at the official opening, on May 24, 1883, New York City Congressman Abram Hewitt thanked her extensively. As he put it, “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.” The Brooklyn Bridge itself would stand as “an everlasting monument to the self-sacrificing devotion of a woman” declared Hewitt, and to “her capacity for that higher education from which she has been too long disbarred.” At a moment of triumph for the Brooklyn Bridge and its builders, the Congressman’s comment foreshadowed Emily Warren Roebling’s later work on behalf of women’s equality.