A North Carolina runaway, lecturer and steamboat promoter spent most of twenty-five years trying to bridge the East River from Ravenswood. The city built the Queensboro Bridge without him, and he walked it anyway.
A name in the Lodge records
Before he became a name on the Queens waterfront, Thomas Rainey was a name in the records of Advance Lodge No. 635. Public membership lists identify him as a member, and the author has verified that connection against the lodge’s own records. Those records supply a precise detail: Rainey was fifty-six when he was raised to the degree of Master Mason on November 29, 1881, ten days before his fifty-seventh birthday.
That entry places the Ravenswood bridge promoter within another part of the community’s history. It does not explain his ambitions or account for the years he spent pursuing them. It adds a documented fraternal connection to a life more often remembered through steamships, bridge campaigns and the park that bears his name. This article forms part of our history of Advance Lodge No. 635 and its notable members. The accompanying lodge history follows the institution. Here, the story follows the man — and the distance between what he meant to build and what the city finally built.
The Bidge he lived to cross
Early on the morning of May 12, 1909, an old man left a house on Lexington Avenue without telling anyone where he was going. The Brooklyn Eagle said he rode a surface car to Fifty-ninth Street, walked toward the East River, hesitated at the foot of the Queensboro Bridge's Manhattan approach, and began to climb it, over the objections of a policeman who feared the walk would be too much for him.1 The Sun supplied the costume: a skull cap, house slippers, a sack coat, and a hand on the iron railing whenever he needed it.2
The bridge had been open to traffic for six weeks. The walker was Dr. Thomas Rainey, eighty-four, whom Queens neighbors and Brooklyn editors had long called its father, and the span was one the Times priced at $17,000,000.3 The newspapers agreed he was frail. They disagreed about who spotted him, how far he got, and even whose house he had slipped out of. Whether he had built any of the bridge was a harder question than the legend admits.
Rainey's story is usually told as a parable: the visionary who ruined himself for a bridge the city finished without him. The record supports much of that, and complicates it. He was a self-taught lecturer, editor, steamboat promoter and Ravenswood landowner who spent the better part of twenty-five years, by his obituary's count, trying to build a railroad bridge across the East River by way of Blackwell's Island, now Roosevelt Island. How much it cost him, what he actually built, and who first called him a "father" all shifted with each retelling. This article follows him through the documents and says where the legend runs ahead of them.
A runaway from Caswell County
Thomas Rainey was born on December 9, 1824, in Yanceyville, North Carolina, according to the Times obituary, which described him as the oldest of fifteen children.4 The Times obituary says he left home in 1842 after a thrashing, with a pistol, $3.50 and only the "moderate education" the local schools had given him. The Eagle, which said it had printed his own account of the flight in June 1909, repeats the $3.50.5 He worked his way west through what is now West Virginia, Ohio and Missouri, taught school at eighteen, and used the money to reach St. Louis. There, the Times says, he studied phonography (an early shorthand), "arithmetic by cancellation," and medicine.5 The Eagle gives his father's name as James Glen Rainey.6
The medical studies apparently did not end in a degree. The historian Sharla Fett notes that he studied it in Missouri but never graduated from medical school, so the “Dr.” that followed him for the rest of his life should not be taken as evidence of a completed medical degree.7
A restless American mind
By 1850 he was "Professor Rainey," lecturing on a system of arithmetic. A reviewer of Rainey's Improved Abacus, his treatise on arithmetic and measurement, praised its method of setting each problem as a single "statement" and reducing it to an answer by abbreviation, and predicted it would "revolutionize both the theory and practice of numbers."8 The record cannot settle when the book first appeared: the Times says 1847, the edition reviewed in January 1850 carries a Cincinnati, 1850 imprint, and a Troy paper noted a Rainey pamphlet in 1848.
Then came journalism. The Ohio Teacher, a monthly meant to be "a campaign paper for the Teachers of Ohio," began at Columbus in May 1850 with the stated plan of folding within two years, or sooner if the state started a journal of its own. It was later renamed The Western Review.9 In April 1852 a Cleveland paper took the Review apart for an article attacking the Hungarian leader Kossuth, while granting that Rainey's name was "mentioned favorably" in the cause of Western education.9 That spring he also started the Cincinnati Daily Republican as a campaign paper for Winfield Scott, and opponents later said it was financed partly with National Scott Committee money.10
In early 1853 he took up a more glamorous subject: John Ericsson's caloric engine, which ran on heated, expanded air instead of steam. New York legislators asked him to lecture on it, and he toured Western and Southern cities with a working model that a Charleston paper said Ericsson had supplied.11 The notices were warm. A Louisville paper added that the footlights were so hot he had to leave the stage in the first minutes and finish "with much difficulty."11
That November he lectured to a New York mechanics' institute on genius. As the Herald printed it, he told the young men in the audience that "it becomes you to labor," and he held the mechanic's finished works above the idealist, whose monument, he said, was a plan on paper.12 That is a hard sentence to read beside his later career.
His obituary says he knew the scientist Louis Agassiz, the editors Horace Greeley and Charles Dana, and Daniel Webster. The sources identified here do not independently confirm the Agassiz, Greeley or Webster friendships.13
His first brush with federal office was strange. In January 1854 the Senate confirmed Thomas Rainey as United States consul to Bolivia.14 The Times obituary says he refused the post because he had opposed Franklin Pierce.13 Newspapers at the time told another story. Whig and Democratic editors alike marveled that the manager of a Scott campaign paper had landed an appointment from Pierce. One paper, citing "a reliable source," said Pierce had been misled about Rainey's party and told him to resign or be removed, and an Ohio congressman wrote that his state's delegation had protested.14 The papers show a nomination, a confirmation and a scandal. They do not show a posting.
Steam, mail and a ferry fleet in Rio
He did go to South America. A Perrysburg, Ohio, paper reported in May 1855 that "Prof. Thomas Rainey" had returned to New York from "a year or two" on an exploring expedition, and the Times says he explored the Amazon valley and decided Brazil would be his home.15 By 1856 he was the projector of a plan, with a Novelty Works engine builder, a Savannah steamship owner and the shipbuilder William H. Webb, to carry United States mail by steamer from New York to Pará by way of the West Indies. A New Orleans paper described the petition to Congress and a committee's favorable report.15
His 1858 book, Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post, grew from that campaign. The preface, dated New York, December 9, 1857, says members of Congress had asked for a reliable reference, and argues that a mail-steamer system "can never be attained by private enterprise" but only through the support of the general government.16 A review from the London Times, reprinted in The Argus that September, called the book well written and its author an advocate of "indignation, pathos, and withering sarcasm," but thought he had mistaken effect for cause.16
In September 1858 President Buchanan named him special agent to accompany Africans recaptured from the slave ship Echo from Charleston to Liberia aboard the frigate Niagara.17 Fett, whose Recaptured Africans covers the episode in detail, says Rainey was the only white United States agent aboard who spoke some Portuguese, a skill he owed to his time in Brazil, and that his report identified many of the captives as Kikongo speakers from the lower Congo region.17 Rainey's own account, printed that December, says 271 people boarded at Charleston and 71 died before Monrovia, which squares with the 26 percent mortality Fett reports.18 His account blamed the slave trade and described the captives in the dehumanizing language of its day, which this article does not repeat. Fett is where to learn who they were.
The ferries came next. On Saturday, September 8, 1860, the first steamboat built in the United States for Brazil slid down the ways at Webb & Bell's yard in Greenpoint. Brazil's minister christened her the Primeira, Rainey hosted the party afterward, and the Herald said he had organized the Rio company and broken the British prestige in the trade.19 The line opened on June 29, 1862, before a crowd that included the imperial couple, and the Primeira promptly struck a barge and two sailboats and ended up on a shoal. Niterói papers later complained of filth, delays and explosions, and one accused Rainey of treating passengers "as a conquered people." He answered critics in print, once telling an Englishman he would take a whip to him. In 1874, one study of United States ties with Brazil says, he sold his shares and left Rio "a wealthy man."20
A different payday came late. In 1890 papers reported that a claim from the ferry's early years, a suit that had dragged nearly sixteen years through Rio's courts and earned the nickname "Rainey's chestnut," had been settled for $300,000, with more than $100,000 of it going to the lawyer who pursued it.21 That sits awkwardly beside the Times' tidy statement that the bridge consumed his "entire fortune." It does not disprove it: the papers do not say where the money went. Late in life, the Times adds, he called settling in Brazil "the great mistake of his life." The obituary gives no reason.22
The man who saw Queens early
On July 7, 1875, at a church in Ravenswood, "Dr. Thomas Rainey, of Rio de Janeiro," married Grace Priscilla Ogden.23 He settled in Ravenswood, then part of Long Island City. Accounts of when the bridge work began scatter: 1874 in a wire obituary, 1875 in the Eagle's life story, July 1876 in an 1899 Eagle item, 1879 in an Eagle interview of 1909.24 An item reprinted in an 1882 paper shows him addressing Queens County citizens at Jamaica's Town Hall as president of the bridge company.25
In December 1886 the Eagle laid out his plan. Bills were before Congress from Senator Evarts and Mr. Hewitt. The design came from C. C. Schneider, designer of the Niagara cantilever (a bridge whose arms reach out from its towers). Two 800-foot spans would stand 150 feet above high water and carry two railway tracks, at a cost of $6 million to $7 million with approaches, with money to be sought in England. The Eagle placed the crossing near Sixtieth Street, about a mile south of the site first contemplated.26
In June 1887 a Brooklyn Daily Times reporter found him in his Ravenswood garden, hoeing cabbages, and asked whether Brooklyn should build its own bridge or tunnel. Rainey called a tunnel "simply an absurdity," said he had examined the Mersey tunnel in England the year before, and argued that his bridge, with a rail line into Brooklyn, would bring factories rather than commuters. "Mere dwelling houses," he said, "will do but little for a city."27 Set that against the Queens that actually came: by 1908 the Eagle was calling the borough a "City of Homes," with nearly three-quarters of its dwellings owner-occupied.28 The comparison is mine, not the papers'.
He was not always sunny in public. At a February 1893 hearing before Mayor Gilroy and city finance officials, Rainey insisted that the law behind his bridge company required the city to sell him land under water on Blackwell's Island, and that otherwise he would take it by condemnation. The Mayor said he had never seen a law more loosely drawn and eventually left the room. The Evening World's headline was "Rainey Loses His Temper."29 It was not the only flash. In 1852 a Louisville paper, quoting Cincinnati papers, reported a cowhiding outside a church and "inferred" that the parties were Rainey and one Crafts J. Wright, with Wright the sufferer. That identification is the paper's guess.30
By 1899 the Eagle said his charter had been renewed several times by the Legislature, that he had spent about $600,000 of his own money, and that his work amounted to a cofferdam behind property he owned on the Ravenswood shore. Foundation work for a tower, the paper said, was never begun.31 A year later, in an April 1900 letter correcting a Times report, Rainey himself gave different numbers. He and his wife had spent "more than three hundred thousand dollars" over twenty-three and three-quarter years, he wrote, and friends and associates had put in work and right of way now worth more than $400,000. He described a bridge with four railway tracks, two carriageways each twenty-one feet wide, four feet wider than the Brooklyn Bridge's, two walkways and two bicycle ways.32 So the famous $600,000 "entire fortune" is, on Rainey's own evidence, one of several numbers.
He did not work alone, though the record hands out credit unevenly. In October 1908 the Eagle said Mrs. Rainey "planned with him" and did her share in interesting other women, and it listed backers he had enlisted: the Steinways, the Crimmins brothers, Austin Corbin, Charles M. Pratt and a president of the Long Island Rail Road. In March 1909 it added that she had helped organize clubs of public-spirited women to press the case.33 The Times obituary mentions her once, in its last line, as the wife who died the previous August.33 Rainey's 1900 letter names only Pratt, by initials, and "the late Austin Corbin." The longer list comes from newspapers in the middle of a celebration and should be read that way.
How he became the Father of the Bridge
The city took up the bridge, the Eagle said in 1910, during the Van Wyck administration; a syndicated profile put the year at 1902.34 Meanwhile the honors grew, and so did the claims. In October 1908 the Eagle called him "the pioneer and chief sacrificial promoter" of the idea. In March 1909 it said he "built the piers on which the structure rests," and lost his hearing doing it.35 The same paper's 1899 account has no tower foundation begun, and its 1910 life story says only that piles he sank off the Long Island shore were visible from the bridge at low tide.35
On opening day, March 30, 1909, he stayed home. The Eagle found him in a sunny room on Lexington Avenue with the newspapers spread around him; the nearest he had come to the bridge, the paper said, was from a ferryboat. He hoped to attend the June 12 celebration and thought he might cross sooner if April proved mild.36
He did not wait for the celebration. Three versions of what he said survive in the accounts cited here. The Times has him telling the family who found him, "This is my bridge," and calling it "the child of my thought and of long years of arduous toil and sacrifice." A Syracuse paper's dispatch has him on the span, in tears, calling it "a grand bridge, much greater than the one I had in mind," and pointing to a ruined heap of stone on the shore that he named the old towers of his own bridge. The Eagle, quoting him "afterward," has the city taking "a personal success" from him but turning his idea into a bridge, "monument enough for any man."37 These are one man's words filtered through three newspapers. None is a transcript.
The honor was real. At the time of the celebration, the Times says, he received a gold medal inscribed "The Father of the Bridge," and a tablet commemorating his work was to be placed on the span.38 The sources identified here do not establish whether he attended the celebration or whether the tablet was ever mounted.
He died at 349 Lexington Avenue on March 29, 1910. The Times gave pneumonia as the cause; the Eagle called it a complication of diseases due to old age.39 Wire reports described "years of obscurity" and a tragic story.40 The Eagle's editorial was kinder and cooler. His plans, it said, had failed not for lack of sense but because no public demand yet existed for them. "Where the individual failed the community triumphed." He belonged to the class of men with "big mechanical ideas" who cannot bring them to the practicable stage, which was "his misfortune but not to his discredit."40 Yet the same paper's news story the day before reported that there was "not a man in Long Island City today who will not tell you frankly" that without Rainey the bridge would probably have come much later.41
Both judgments can be true. Here is my reading, not a documented fact: his 1858 preface argued that big transport systems need public money, and the city's money is what finally built the bridge. The irony may be the strongest argument he left for himself.
A name on the shore
The city later named a waterfront park in Ravenswood for him. The Parks Department’s history of Rainey Park carries his name forward, though its account of his bridge crossing differs from the contemporary reports cited here. The park’s story belongs to Part 2 of this series.
Some people leave a structure behind. Rainey left something harder to measure: a route, a name and an argument. The Eagle and a syndicated profile both said stumps of his work were visible from the new bridge in 1910; whether anything of them remains in the river is not established by the sources identified here. What the newspaper accounts preserve is an eighty-four-year-old on the approach to a bridge he did not build, telling a reporter, in the Eagle's rendering, that it was "monument enough for any man."
A note on the sources
This account follows contemporary newspaper reports as identified in the research draft, while distinguishing reported claims from established construction history. The original clippings were not included with that draft. Most newspaper citations below therefore remain dependent on its transcriptions and source descriptions; missing dates, pages, and uncertain quotations have not been silently supplied. Rainey’s 1858 preface was checked against the linked full text. The Times archive listing verifies the obituary’s date, page, and headline, but not every detail quoted from its body. The Parks Department’s later account repeats an opening-day crossing with Governor Hughes; it is not used here to settle the conflicting contemporary accounts.
Endnotes
- Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 1909, account of the May 12 walk. Source detail not yet verified: exact date, page.
- The Sun (New York), May 1909, walk report (wire dispatch; also appears in Boston Globe, Greenville News, Fall River items, which are not independent). Source detail not yet verified.
- “Dr. Thomas Rainey, Bridge Father, Dead,” New York Times, March 30, 1910, p. 12. The archive listing confirms the date, page, and headline’s claim of twenty-five years and $600,000. Other obituary details quoted in this article follow the supplied transcription, not an independently checked page image. Reprints in the Reidsville Review and Webster’s Weekly are not independent accounts. The $17,000,000 bridge cost is the obituary’s figure, not a reconciled final construction total.
- New York Times obituary, March 30, 1910; birth date also in the Sun, Webster's Weekly, New Ulm item, and a Find a Grave listing (secondary). Brooklyn Eagle gives 1821; treated as misprint.
- Times obituary; Brooklyn Eagle, March 29, 1910, life story citing Rainey's own account printed June 12, 1909 (that page is in the packet as a note only). Source detail not yet verified: June 12, 1909 page.
- Brooklyn Eagle, March 29, 1910.
- Sharla M. Fett, Recaptured Africans (2017). Source detail not yet verified: page.
- Review of Rainey's Improved Abacus, January 1850 (Cincinnati, 1850 imprint); Times obituary (1847); Troy paper, June 1848. Source detail not yet verified: publication names.
- Ohio Teacher / Western Review notices, 1850; Cleveland paper, April 1852 (Kossuth article). Source detail not yet verified.
- 1852 newspaper items on the Cincinnati Daily Republican and the National Scott Committee. Source detail not yet verified.
- 1853 notices of the caloric-engine lectures (Charleston; Louisville papers). Source detail not yet verified.
- New York Herald, November 1853 lecture report. Exact date and page remain unidentified; the supplied account flags the OCR reading “it becomes you to labor” as uncertain. This quotation requires inspection of the original scan before publication.
- Times obituary (Agassiz, Greeley, Dana, Webster; Bolivia refusal). No independent confirmation in the packet.
- U.S. Senate confirmation, January 1854, and contemporary newspaper items on the Bolivia appointment (including the "reliable source" item and the Ohio congressman's letter). Source detail not yet verified.
- Perrysburg, Ohio, paper, May 1855; Times obituary; New Orleans paper, 1856, on the mail-steamer petition. Source detail not yet verified.
- Thomas Rainey, Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1858), preface, pp. v–vi, dated New York, Dec. 9, 1857; London Times review as reprinted in The Argus, September 1858. The quotation about private enterprise is verified on p. vi. The London Times/Argus review remains unverified.
- 1858 newspaper reports of the Echo agent appointment; Fett, Recaptured Africans. Source detail not yet verified.
- Rainey's account printed December 1858; Fett (26 percent mortality; 71 of 271 = 26.2 percent).
- New York Herald, September 1860, launch of the Primeira at Webb & Bell's yard, Greenpoint (Saturday, Sept. 8, 1860).
- Niterói press and other items on the 1862 opening and later complaints; The American Mirror (Brazil study) for the 1874 sale. Source detail not yet verified.
- 1890 newspaper reports of the $300,000 settlement ("Rainey's chestnut"). Source detail not yet verified.
- Times obituary.
- July 1875 marriage notice, Ravenswood (names Samuel G. Ogden and Julia Fairlie).
- Wire obituary (1874); Eagle 1910 (1875); Eagle 1899 (July 1876); Eagle 1909 (1879).
- 1882 item on the Jamaica Town Hall meeting, reprinted in a later paper. Source detail not yet verified.
- Brooklyn Eagle, December 1886 (Evarts and Hewitt bills; Schneider design; Sixtieth Street site).
- Brooklyn Daily Times, June 1887 interview.
- Brooklyn Eagle, 1908, on Queens as a "City of Homes." The comparison with the 1887 remark is the author's, not the paper's.
- Evening World, February 1893, "Rainey Loses His Temper."
- Louisville paper, 1852, quoting Cincinnati papers. The identification of the parties is the paper's inference.
- Brooklyn Eagle, 1899 (cofferdam; about $600,000).
- Rainey letter to the New York Times, April 1900 ($300,000+; $400,000+; bridge specifications).
- Brooklyn Eagle, October 1908 and March 1909; Times obituary (wife's death).
- Brooklyn Eagle, 1910 (Van Wyck administration); syndicated profile giving 1902.
- Brooklyn Eagle, October 1908 and March 1909 ("built the piers"); Eagle 1899 and 1910 for the contrary details.
- Brooklyn Eagle, March 30–31, 1909 interview at Lexington Avenue.
- Times obituary ("This is my bridge"; "child of my thought"); Syracuse paper dispatch; Brooklyn Eagle, May 1909. Source detail not yet verified.
- Times obituary (gold medal; tablet).
- Times and Brooklyn Eagle, March 29–30, 1910.
- Wire reports, March 1910; Brooklyn Eagle editorial, March 30, 1910.
- Brooklyn Eagle, March 29, 1910, news story.
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Continue to Part 2: Rainey Park and the waterfront where a bridge was meant to land.
