A bridge to the past
Early resident helped create stone arches, communities
Staff writer
Old stone-arch bridges near Brendan Lindsey’s home in Butler County sparked a question: Who built them?
The search for an answer led him to Walter Sharp, an early Marion resident who became one of Kansas’ most prolific bridge builders — and more.
“I thought, wow, these are really cool bridges,” Lindsey said. “I wonder how and when they built these? And one thing led to the next.”
That eventually became Lindsey’s 2025 book, “Walter Sharp: A Story of Bridges, the Good Roads Movement, and Decentralized Infrastructure,” which he discussed Sept. 5 at Marion City Library.
A self-described jack-of-all-trades, Lindsey is a stone mason and writer, giving him both a professional and personal interest in Sharp’s story.
Sharp launched his bridge-building career in Marion before taking his work across Kansas and as far as New Mexico. But as Lindsey dug deeper, he discovered that bridges were only part of the story. Sharp was also an entrepreneur, writer, aspiring politician, and tireless advocate for communities where he lived.
Lindsey’s book is a collection of Sharp’s writings, along with newspaper interviews and articles about him on topics ranging from the engineering and economics of bridge building to Prohibition and the El Dorado oil boom.
Born in Minnesota in 1858 and raised in Burlingame, Sharp came to Marion in 1880, intending only to visit. But he liked the town and met his wife, Elizabeth Mott that same year. He stayed to farm and raise livestock. He also tried his hand at business — but not always successfully.
Convinced there was coal beneath Marion, Sharp invested his life savings to drill for it. None was found, but he did discover mineral water.
At the time, Americans were flocking to mineral springs and health resorts in hopes that the waters could cure an assortment of ailments. Sharp’s failed coal venture became the Marion Mineral Wells, and later, Marion Sanitarium.
Sharp constructed a large stone bathhouse and wrote letters touting visitors cured of dyspepsia, rheumatism, and sick headaches. The business drew customers but never became the booming tourist attraction Sharp had hoped for.
Some accounts claim Sharp’s mineral wells later became Chingawasa Springs. However, Lindsey says, those were two separate attractions that competed.
In an 1892 letter, Sharp wrote in the Marion Record: “Let those who want a bath for cleanliness go to Chingawasa, where they don’t pretend to cure anyone. But if you are sick, go to the Marion Sanitarium and get cured.”
Eventually, Sharp gave up on the mineral wells: “I have come to the conclusion that I am not smart enough to make a living without work.”
Sharp’s next endeavor was building small stone culverts in Marion and Chase counties.
Lindsey believes some of Sharp’s culverts still stand in Marion County, but records are sparse.
Soon, his stone masonry was in high demand. At the time, counties relied heavily on steel bridges. Stone bridges could be made with locally quarried stone and with local labor, keeping the money in the community. Properly built, they could last for generations.
By 1906, Lindsey estimates, Sharp had constructed more than 200 stone-arch bridges and culverts in Kansas, mostly in Cowley, Butler, and surrounding counties.
Cowley County, dubbed the “Stone Bridge Capital of Kansas,” still has numerous examples of bridges he helped popularize.
Sharp’s work with bridges also connected him to a much larger national grassroots effort — the Good Roads Movement, which gathered strength in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
For Sharp, better roads and bridges weren’t simply conveniences.
“In each place he lived, whether it was Marion, El Dorado or Winfield, he’s always boosting the city,” Lindsey said.
Sharp believed communities needed “good transportation first, good roads, good buildings,” Lindsey said.
In Marion, Sharp advocated building a city hall but never succeeded. He also ran, unsuccessfully, for political office.
“His key was, whether it was building a bridge or a town, citizens should pull together for the entire community’s benefit,” Lindsey said.
In El Dorado, Sharp bought dilapidated properties and replaced them with better buildings in an effort to boost the town’s curb appeal.
His bridge-building continued to expand, with increasingly ambitious structures. In 1902, he built a stone-arch bridge in Raton, New Mexico.
He also experimented with concrete. He developed a reinforced concrete slab design and patented it. His work eventually became entangled in the era’s numerous disputes over bridge patents.
Meanwhile, the regulatory and political environment for building infrastructure was changing.
As automobiles became common, roads and bridges increasingly attracted state and federal involvement. Sharp became an outspoken critic of government building programs and regulations.
It didn’t make sense, he said, for officials in Topeka to determine what type of bridge should be built across a creek they had never seen.
Sharp moved to Winfield in 1912 and lived there until his death in 1929.
He stopped building by the 1920s, but continued writing.
Some of the structures he built are still standing more than a century later, including the Peter Johnson Bridge in Butler County, built in 1895.
Having studied Sharp’s construction methods, Lindsey adopted some himself.
He employed Sharp’s techniques in 2025 when, with help from volunteers and with stone quarried nearby, he built a small stone bridge for Camp Quaker Haven in Arkansas City.
For Lindsey, however, Sharp’s larger legacy lies not just in his surviving stonework but in the ideas behind it:
Build things to last, use local resources when possible, and prioritize infrastructure as an investment in a community’s future.
That philosophy took Sharp far beyond Marion. But Marion was where much of it began.