Horace King: The Bridge Builder
Near Columbus, Alabama
In eighteen thirty-two, a contractor named John Godwin arrived in Columbus with a commission to build a bridge. The Chattahoochee here was over five hundred feet wide, the banks muddy and prone to flooding, the engineering challenge substantial. Godwin was white, from South Carolina, and had a reputation for building things that stayed up. With him, working as a partner in everything but legal standing, was an enslaved man named Horace King.
King had been born into slavery in South Carolina in eighteen oh seven. Godwin had purchased him, and then, in a partnership that no law of the time required and most Southern custom discouraged, had taught him to read, write, and build, brought him into his contracting business, and treated him as a collaborator. The Columbus City Bridge that they built together in eighteen thirty-two, spanning the Chattahoochee between Columbus and what is now Phenix City, is the first known major work by Horace King's hand.
Godwin freed King in eighteen forty-six, an act that required special permission from the Alabama legislature, since Alabama law restricted freed slaves from remaining in the state. King went on to build bridges across Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, dozens of major spans, including courthouses, warehouses, and public buildings. He later built the signature spiral staircases and interior framework of the antebellum Alabama State Capitol. His reputation was such that both Confederate and Union forces, during the war, asked him to rebuild bridges they had each destroyed.
After the war, King registered voters in Russell County, Alabama and was elected to the Alabama state legislature in eighteen sixty-eight, serving two terms during Reconstruction. He built the City Mills building in Columbus, the oldest structure in the Historic Riverfront District, in eighteen sixty-nine.
He died in LaGrange, Georgia, in eighteen eighty-five, where he had moved years earlier. Both Black and white residents attended his funeral, which was noted as unusual at the time. The state of Alabama has placed a historical marker at his home site in Phenix City.
