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mind of her own and some very fixed ideas about getting on in the world. It was their proud, determined, long-departed grandmother, Friederike Dorothea, John Roebling’s children were raised to understand, who scraped and saved to send their father to the famous Polytechnic Institute in Berlin, and who later was the first to support his decision to leave Mühlhausen, something no Roebling had done before.
    In Berlin, he had studied architecture, bridge construction, and hydraulics. He also studied philosophy under Hegel, who, according to one biographical memoir, “avowed that John Roebling was his favorite pupil.” The renowned philosopher had been preaching a powerful doctrine of self-realization and the supremacy of reason to a generation of ardent young liberals hemmed in by an autocratic Prussian regime. The effect was pronounced, and not the least on Roebling. The contact with Hegel was a privilege and a calamity for Roebling, according to an old family friend in Trenton. Hegel had taught Roebling to think independently, he said, and to rely on the validity of his own conclusions, but the experience was a calamity “because it begat a pride and arrogance of opinion and a frigid intellectuality that came near putting the heart of him into cold storage.” But according to family tradition, it was Hegel who started the young man thinking about America. “It is a land of hope for all who are wearied of the historic armory of old Europe,” Hegel taught. There the future would be built. There in all that “immeasurable space” a man might determine his own destiny.
    For three years after leaving Berlin, Roebling worked in an obligatory job building roads for the Prussian government. Once during a holiday in Bavaria, he had hiked to the old cathedral town of Bamberg, where he saw his first suspension bridge, a new iron chain bridge over the Regnitz and known locally as the “miracle bridge.” He walked about it, made a number of sketches, and it is the traditional story that he decided then and there on his life’s career.
    In any event, not long afterward, in the spring of 1831, the year Hegel would die of cholera, Roebling returned to Mühlhausen and began organizing a party of pilgrims to leave for America, something that had to be done with caution just then since the government frowned on the immigration of anyone with technical training.
    Talk of immigration was a common thing in Germany. Ever since the July Revolution of the previous year, there had been increasingly less personal freedom, less opportunity for anyone with ambition. Nothing could be accomplished, Roebling would write, “without first having an army of government councilors, ministers, and other functionaries deliberate about it for ten years, make numerous expensive journeys by post, and write so many long reports about it, that for the amount expended for all this, reckoning compound interest for ten years, the work could have been completed.”
    In the first week of May there had been the farewell visits with school friends and aged aunts, the last Sunday at church, the final evening walks through the ancient cobblestone streets. Then on the morning of the 11th, with his older brother Karl and a number of others, he had set off. His determination now was to become…an American farmer! Having had no previous experience in agriculture, having nothing in his background, training, or temperament that would indicate any interest in or bent for such work, he would become a man of the soil, in a distant land he knew only by reputation. The architect, the scholar, the musician, the philosopher, the engineer, the burning liberal idealist, the twenty-four-year-old bachelor, would now plant himself, willfully, somewhere in the American wilderness. His ambition was to establish his own community, which if not utopian in the religious sense—like Harmony, Pennsylvania, or some of the other earlier settlements founded by zealous Germans—would at