|
Great Fire Of Troy
The Great Fire of Troy occurred on May 11, 1862, and destroyed a large part of the downtown area of Troy, New York. The damage caused by the fire was approximately $3,000,000, with between about 500 to 600 buildings destroyed over . Background The Rensselaer and Saratoga Railroad Green Island Bridge was a wood-truss covered bridge built in 1832, and used by trains to cross the Hudson River from downtown Troy. The majority of the buildings in downtown area were also made of timber, making them susceptible to fires. Troy had recently bought new steam-powered fire trucks, which were more efficient than the handheld pumpers used at the time. Incident On May 11, 1862, a strong wind was blowing in downtown Troy. Around noon, a train, driven by George C. Troyibald, had left the Troy Union Depot and was crossing the Green Island Bridge when sparks from the engine caused the wooden shingles on the roof of the bridge to catch on fire. Parts of the burning structure, floating with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Damage By The Great Fire Of Troy
Damage is any change in a thing, often a physical object, that degrades it away from its initial state. It can broadly be defined as "changes introduced into a system that adversely affect its current or future performance".Farrar, C.R., Sohn, H., Park, G.,Converting Large Sensor Array Data into Structural Health Information, in Andrew Smyth, Raimondo Betti, ''The 4th International Workshop on Structural Control'' (2005), p. 67. Damage "does not necessarily imply total loss of system functionality, but rather that the system is no longer operating in its optimal manner". Damage to physical objects is "the progressive physical process by which they break",Jean Lemaitre, ''A Course on Damage Mechanics'' (2013). and includes mechanical stress that weakens a structure, even if this is not visible. Physical damage All physical damage begins on the atomic level, with the shifting or breaking of atomic bonds, and the rate at which damage to any physical thing occurs is therefore l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Troy, New York
Troy is a city in the U.S. state of New York and the county seat of Rensselaer County. The city is located on the western edge of Rensselaer County and on the eastern bank of the Hudson River. Troy has close ties to the nearby cities of Albany and Schenectady, forming a region popularly called the Capital District. The city is one of the three major centers for the Albany metropolitan statistical area, which has a population of 1,170,483. At the 2020 census, the population of Troy was 51,401. Troy's motto is ''Ilium fuit, Troja est'', which means "Ilium was, Troy is". Today, Troy is home to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the oldest private engineering and technical university in the US, founded in 1824. It is also home to Emma Willard School, an all-girls high school started by Emma Willard, a women's education activist, who sought to create a school for girls equal to their male counterparts. Due to the confluence of major waterways and a geography that supported water power ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rensselaer And Saratoga Railroad
The Rensselaer and Saratoga Railroad was chartered on April 14, 1832. It completed between Troy and Ballston Spa on March 19, 1836. The railroad was largely conceived and built by businessmen of Troy in response to Albany's construction of the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad and the extension to Saratoga called the Saratoga and Schenectady Railroad. Despite its name, the railroad only reached to Ballston Spa and relied on the Saratoga and Schenectady to give it access to Saratoga Springs, New York. When an agreement was not forthcoming, investors seized an opportunity to buy up Saratoga and Schenectady stock and take control of the railroad. Later acquisitions included trackage to Whitehall, New York and a line of steamers that plied Lake Champlain, allowing tourists to travel from Troy to Canada entirely by steam conveyance for the first time. The last expansion before the merger with the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company involved building new sections of track between Green Islan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Green Island Bridge
The Green Island Bridge crosses the Hudson River in New York, connecting Green Island with Troy, passing through Starbuck Island. It opened September 12, 1981. History The original Rensselaer and Saratoga Railroad bridge was a wood-truss covered bridge built in 1832. On May 10, 1862, it caught fire from the sparks of a passing locomotive and soon fell into the river. Parts of the burning structure, floating with the current, imperiled the steamboats and the smaller craft tied up along the wharves. The devastating wind-driven fire also consumed more than 500 buildings covering of downtown Troy. This bridge was replaced by a second wooden bridge. In 1884 a steel railroad bridge replaced the second wooden bridge. The steel bridge was really two parallel bridges owned by the Delaware and Hudson Railroad. When rail service ended in Troy on July 27, 1963, it was converted for automobile traffic. Until then the northern span was a rail bridge, and the southern span was a toll ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Truss Bridge
A truss bridge is a bridge whose load-bearing superstructure is composed of a truss, a structure of connected elements, usually forming triangular units. The connected elements (typically straight) may be stressed from tension, compression, or sometimes both in response to dynamic loads. The basic types of truss bridges shown in this article have simple designs which could be easily analyzed by 19th and early 20th-century engineers. A truss bridge is economical to construct because it uses materials efficiently. Design The nature of a truss allows the analysis of its structure using a few assumptions and the application of Newton's laws of motion according to the branch of physics known as statics. For purposes of analysis, trusses are assumed to be pin jointed where the straight components meet, meaning that taken alone, every joint on the structure is functionally considered to be a flexible joint as opposed to a rigid joint with strength to maintain its own shape, and th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Covered Bridge
A covered bridge is a timber-truss bridge with a roof, decking, and siding, which in most covered bridges create an almost complete enclosure. The purpose of the covering is to protect the wooden structural members from the weather. Uncovered wooden bridges typically have a lifespan of only 20 years because of the effects of rain and sun, but a covered bridge could last over 100 years. In the United States, only about 1 in 10 survived the 20th century. The relatively small number of surviving bridges is due to deliberate replacement, neglect, and the high cost of restoration. European and North American truss bridges Typically, covered bridges are structures with longitudinal timber-trusses which form the bridge's backbone. Some were built as railway bridges, using very heavy timbers and doubled up lattice work. In Canada and the U.S., numerous timber covered bridges were built in the late 1700s to the late 1800s, reminiscent of earlier designs in Germany and Switzerland. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hudson River
The Hudson River is a river that flows from north to south primarily through eastern New York. It originates in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York and flows southward through the Hudson Valley to the New York Harbor between New York City and Jersey City, eventually draining into the Atlantic Ocean at Lower New York Bay. The river serves as a political boundary between the states of New Jersey and New York at its southern end. Farther north, it marks local boundaries between several New York counties. The lower half of the river is a tidal estuary, deeper than the body of water into which it flows, occupying the Hudson Fjord, an inlet which formed during the most recent period of North American glaciation, estimated at 26,000 to 13,300 years ago. Even as far north as the city of Troy, the flow of the river changes direction with the tides. The Hudson River runs through the Munsee, Lenape, Mohican, Mohawk, and Haudenosaunee homelands. Prior to European ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Private Residence
A home, or domicile, is a space used as a permanent or semi-permanent residence for one or many humans, and sometimes various companion animals. It is a fully or semi sheltered space and can have both interior and exterior aspects to it. Homes provide sheltered spaces, for instance rooms, where domestic activity can be performed such as sleeping, preparing food, eating and hygiene as well as providing spaces for work and leisure such as remote working, studying and playing. Physical forms of homes can be static such as a house or an apartment, mobile such as a houseboat, trailer or yurt or digital such as virtual space. The aspect of ‘home’ can be considered across scales; from the micro scale showcasing the most intimate spaces of the individual dwelling and direct surrounding area to the macro scale of the geographic area such as town, village, city, country or planet. The concept of ‘home’ has been researched and theorized across disciplines – topics ranging ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute () (RPI) is a private research university in Troy, New York, with an additional campus in Hartford, Connecticut. A third campus in Groton, Connecticut closed in 2018. RPI was established in 1824 by Stephen Van Rensselaer and Amos Eaton for the "application of science to the common purposes of life" and is the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world and the Western Hemisphere. Built on a hillside, RPI's campus overlooks the city of Troy and the Hudson River, and is a blend of traditional and modern architecture. The institute operates an on‑campus business incubator and the Rensselaer Technology Park. RPI is organized into six main schools which contain 37 departments, with emphasis on science and technology. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities: Very High Research Activity" and many of its engineering programs are highly ranked. As of 2017, RPI's faculty and alumni included 6 members of the National Inve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states that had seceded. The central cause of the war was the dispute over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prevented from doing so, which was widely believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction. Decades of political controversy over slavery were brought to a head by the victory in the 1860 U.S. presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery's expansion into the west. An initial seven southern slave states responded to Lincoln's victory by seceding from the United States and, in 1861, forming the Confederacy. The Confederacy seized U.S. forts and other federal assets within their borders. Led by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rensselaer County Historical Society
The Rensselaer County Historical Society (RCHS) is a non-profit, historical society and museum, to promote the study of the history of the Rensselaer County, NY. RCHS was founded in 1927, and originally operated out of a single room in the Troy Public Library, collecting manuscripts and published materials related to the county's history. It is located in the Central Troy Historic District, in Troy, NY. The Rensselaer County Historical Society operates a museum, and offers public programs from its location at 57 Second Street, Troy, NY. Incorporation RCHS was incorporated to: # Promote and encourage historical research, # Disseminate a greater knowledge of the early history of that portion of the State of New York known as Rensselaer County, # Gather and preserve books, manuscripts, papers and relics relating to the early history of Rensselaer County and the contiguous territory, # Suitably mark places of historic interest, and acquire by purchase, gift, devise or otherwise, t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
_bridge%2C_entrance%2C_circa_1877_-_DPLA_-_d729e9efdd48d34d1fce20fb80c6bd89.jpeg "Click for more on -> Covered Bridge")
