Women’s work in the Iowa Highway Commission (2)

Excerpted from “Main roads designed as 24-foot pavement,” by Ellen Landon, Ames Daily Tribune, June 9, 1953, with some cleanup:

The bridge design division makes preliminary layouts and final detail design and drawing and bridges or large culverts on a project.

“We have one department which is composed largely of women,” [R.C.] Boyd[, head of the design department,] explained. “It is the general drafting division. These women are very apt at making special drawings and also design smaller standard culverts.”

The final treatment of plans before they go on to the administration department for bidding comes in the blueprint room presided over by Walter Bappe. He has numerous pieces of interesting equipment including a big blueprint machine which operates by a photographic process. Here all plans are blueprinted in quantity so that bidders may have [text missing].

Not all the blueprints are taken away, however, for it is in this department that a file of every project undertaken is kept. Bappe takes pride in pointing to some drawings on file done by Former Chief Engineer Fred C. White when he was still in college.

==========

This historical excerpt and the previous one have implications for the research I do today. They show that women had a significant role in IHC documentation before computer-aided design (following, admittedly, work done by all-male crews). I am thankful to them for all their work, and of course I’m thankful that the 20th century Highway Commission/DOT is as good/bad at saving everything as I am.

This entry was posted in Iowa Miscellaneous. Bookmark the permalink.