O. E. Peppard – Very Busy Bridge Builder
The following information is taken from Historic Bridges in Montana by Fredric L. Quivik – The U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service Historic American Engineering Record – Spring, 1982.
O. E. Peppard
The first Montana bridge builder to come into prominence was O. E. Peppard of Missoula. Obert E. Peppard was born on December 15, 1855 at Lansing, Michigan and grew up in Red Field, Iowa, where his father was a bridge builder. He left Iowa in 1881, heading for Alaska to find his fortune. He worked on construction projects along the way, eventually getting on the Northern Pacific payroll. Obert was made supervisor of bridges and buildings for the Northern Pacific’s Missoula division and was responsible for building all of the bridges on the Bitterroot and Philipsburg branch lines.
Sometime in the late 1880’s O. E. Peppard decided to start his own bridge building company. The earliest known bridges built by O. E. Peppard were in Deer Lodge County. On April 16, 1889, he received a contract to build a wood combination truss bridge at Gold Creek and an iron truss bridge at Deer Lodge. The latter bridge was built only one year after the Fort Benton Bridge and is the second known iron truss vehicular bridge built in Montana. By 1890 he was bidding on bridges in Missoula County. In the early 1890’s O. E. Peppard built the Higgins Avenue Bridge, a structure washed out by the flood of 1908.
During World War I, the bridge business slowed. Peppard went into the farm implement business with two locations: one in Missoula and the other in Spokane, which was operated by his son. But the timing was not good, and with the onset of the bust in agriculture in Montana, Peppard’s farm machinery business closed. Although he was still listed in the City Directory in 1922 as a bridge builder, his main source of income from then until his death was rental of his apartments. O. E. Peppard died on September 24, 1929 at the age of 73.
During the height of his career, O. E. Peppard was one of the busiest bridge builders in Montana. Of the bridges recorded in the Montana Historic Bridge Inventory, only the Security Bridge Company of Billings built more than did Peppard.
Figure 2 – The Bridge Builders in Montana (from Montana Historic Bridge Inv.)
1. Security Bridge Co. (Billings Mt.) – 32 bridges – 1907- 1921
2. O. E. Peppard (Missoula, Mt.) – 27 bridges – 1907 – 1916
3. A. Y. Bayne (Minneapolis, Mn.) – 15 bridges – 1906 – 1911
A total of 41 builders were listed in this inventory chart, and it states that the list is not inclusive of all builders, nor all bridges built.
This document also mentions Peppard in the following quotes:
“The Higgins Avenue Bridge in Missoula, built by O. E. Peppard in 1890’s was washed out in the Flood of 1908. Two of the spans were salvaged and moved upstream to Van Buren Street where they stand today.”
“[T]he railroads brought bridge builders and engineers into Montana to build railroad bridges and many of them stayed. The most prominent of these individuals was O. E. Peppard of Missoula who came to Montana to build bridges for the Northern Pacific and stayed to become one of the most productive of Montana’s vehicular bridge builders.”
“ #6. Milk River Bridge – Coburg”
“O.E. Peppard of Missoula built this single-span, pin-connected, wood and iron combination, sub-divided Camelback through truss bridge over the Milk River in 1916. The through truss has a span length of 173 feet, is 17 feet wide and has a vertifcal clearance of 14 feet. It is a rare structural type, being a sub-divided wooden truss. It is the only one of its kind in Montana, and one of only a few surviving in the United States.”
“Van Buren Street Bridge”
“This bridge consists of two, 132 – foot, pin-connected Parker through truss spans with a timber trestle approach on the south and a timber stringer approach on the north. It is the only through truss in the state with polygonal lower chords, a configuration that seems to have been used to raise the deck above high water. O. E. Peppard built this bridge in 1908. Earlier that same year, Missoula and the rest of Montana experienced its worst flooding in recorded history. The Higgins Avenue Bridge, built by Peppard in the 1890’s, was washed out by the flood and Peppard used part of that bridge in the two-span superstructure of the Van Buren Street Bridge.”
According to the Idaho National Register of Historic Places – Historic Highway Bridges, O. E. Peppard was “known to have been active” in early Idaho bridge building, although none of his bridges remain.
To see a cost estimate on a 200 ft. bridge built by Peppard in 1908 see the link below:
https://books.google.com/books?id=SRk5AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA419&lpg=PA419&dq=montana+bridges+peppard&source=bl&ots=TRk1skh_bg&sig=lCuRezYqbiVA8U6TkIYpVq56w9U&hl=en&sa=X&ei=vdvGVIrwFNH2oASv5oKwBQ&ved=0CEgQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=montana%20bridges%20peppard&f=false