A friend of mine was telling me last night that his Grandfather used to talk about working on a tunnel that went under the Mississippi River... I can't imagaine what this would have been or even if it is true. My friends memory of the stories are from childhood, so maybe he was mistaken. Anyone out there know anything about what this could be?

sure your friend didn't live in Boston??

Big Dig at Boston eh?

There's a big tunnel under the Detroit River that takes you into Windsor, Ont. It would freak me out as a kid to drive through it. I was always planning what I would do if the walls failed.



A tunnel under the Mississippi sounds great. So much more pleasing than a bridge.

I read past proposals to dig tunnels under the river at St. Louis. I'm not sure where I read it though.. I think this was in the 1920's or 30's.

The only tunnels I can think of here would have been to create / maintain the water intakes south of the Chain of Rocks. But I'm sure they wouldn't have been sized for vehicular traffic.

I noticed something about a tunnel when I was doing some research a few months ago. It was in the context of the construction of the Eads bridge, or possibly Union Station. The references were unclear though and simply referred to progress on "the tunnel" if I remember correctly, but for some reason I feel like it was in reference to the Mississippi river. The references I found were in the Taussig Family Papers archival collection at the Missouri Historical Society library on Skinker. Another idea is that the men who sunk the piers for the Eads Bridge worked in giant iron cylinders that were pressurized with compressed air. The cylinders essentially rested on the river bottom and the men shoveled the muck into vacuum pumps that took it to the surface. Outer foundations were laid inside the chamber as it descended and eventually set on bedrock. The hollow foundations were then back-filled with concrete to a point above the water surface. I don't know if this method was used for any of the later bridges, (the bends killed some of the laborers), but if a similar technique was used in later years it could explain how your friend's graddad remembered working in a "tunnel, under the Mississippi River."

Hi, I was looking up tunnels under the Mississippi River myself. Am not sure if there is or isn't any tunnels. But, my father told me there are three tunnels under the Mississippi River. He said, my grandfather on my mother's side owned a very big construction company that built them. Its was also backed up by my mother's brother. I heard the same story about men getting the bend's while working in air chambers, Am not sure if they worked in giant iron cylinders that were pressurized with compressed air for Eads Bridge, Maybe back then. The giant iron cylinders where called tunnels to the men and then somehow later on, it was confused in translation? Bridge's become tunnel's, because how they're built?

My grandfather died in the fifty's. So building of any tunnels would have happened years ago. My mother said she even heard, he would jump in with the men with his suit on? So I believe your grandfather that something big happen back then, it just a matter of research.

I would like to know myself. It wouldn't surprise me if the tunnel's were made and then abandoned because of all the flooding you hear about. I live in Detroit and we do have a tunnel under the Detriot river and if it flooded in Detroit like the Mississippi does. Well, I don't think it would be around anymore ether?

We also have 50 miles of tunnels under Detroit, its for the salt mines below ground. But I bet you never heard of that before ether. I also first heard this from my father because he was on the last tour in the mines back in the early 80's. The mine has been reopened since. Google it? It the biggest salt mine in the US behind San Francisco.

My guess is, people never learn, We keep making the same mistakes over and over because we don't believe what people before us, tell us.

BTW, Am sorry you wrote this five years age. If you ever find out. Please let me know?

I'm not sure about the St. Louis area, but I know their are tunnels running under the river at the Lock and Dam #19 in Keokuk, IA.  That's 3-4 hours North of St. Louis.  They were built under the locks, so that when a barge is passing through you could go under, and also lots of piping, wiring, ect. My mother worked there, and I went into them a number of times when I was younger.  Pretty cool.  Besides going down under, they also ran the length of the locks, which is pretty impressive, because it's a good 1,000 to 1,200 feet long.  These are walking tunnels, not for vehicles, but they are surprisingly big.

jlthornton1279@gmail.com if you have an questions

^Monsanto had electrical lines running under the river from Sauget to the Queeny plant. (Plant two to plant one, at that time, I believe they called it.) Not sure if they were in access tunnels, but it's not impossible. They burned them out in the 80s, in any case. Long abandoned and whatever was there is doubtless filled in by now. There are also several sewer tunnels that run into the river: the Mill Creek sewer and the sewer tunnels under the River DesPair, though I think those latter two technically run to the treatment plant first. Or at least one of them does, anyway. And as was said earlier, there were and are lots of other tunnels. (The DesPair tunnels do, in fact, run under Skinker.) Steam tunnels, sewer tunnels, rail tunnels, access tunnels, caves . . . the list goes on and on. There are miles and miles of the things, and likely even some that are undiscovered and unexplored. The earth may not be hollow per se, but it definitely gets swiss cheesy as you get closer to the surface.

symphonicpoet wrote: DesPair

aprice wrote:

symphonicpoet wrote: DesPair

Because the Missery loves company? Along with the Merymuck and the Missessloppy. Everyone gets a nic.

Hello. I understand that this topic was made way back in 2007, but I've recently come across an article from Maryland in the paper The Democratic Advocate, 1869. In it, the journalist wrote the story of a bridge being built across the Mississippi and a giant tunnel with side passages being found when the workers there were doing blasting work to install piers. I'm not from the St. Louis area. Further research of this topic led to dead-ends until I found this thread. Could this be the tunnel the OPs friend's grandfather worked on? Is this article sensationalist (dating it back to the Assyrian Empire before carbon dating, for instance). Where the finds real? The Geo Survey men had to have names and reports on this incident.

Imgur link with 5 images of the 1869 article that you can read for yourself.

Obviously far-fetched, but a great find anyway. Thanks for sharing

^^No, as the tunnel in the story is a work of pure fantasy. My father sometimes talked about a tunnel under the river linking two chemical plants he worked at, but more reliable sources say it was just a power line. The plants had tunnels, and there was communication across (and under) the river between plants. But no real tunnel. If I had to guess, I'd say it was probably something like that. There's plenty of tunnels and caves in the area. So many, in fact, that quite a few are lost. There are railroad tunnels leading to the bridge in the article, in fact. (Still in use today.) Freight tunnels. Mine tunnels. Plenty of caves. Sneaky prohibition avoiding brewery tunnels. Pipes, shafts, sewer tunnels, steam tunnels . . . you name it. The usual suspects are all there. But I've never encountered a reliable report of anything actually extending under the river, and my inclination is to suspect that had anything been there it would presently be flooded. Streams do sometimes flow across caves, but only when the outlet from the cave is above another stream and thus able to drain into it. You need a pretty good bit of elevation change for that to happen. And the river is pretty much the lowest thing anywhere near it all the way to the Gulf, so . . . not much getting below it. It just doesn't drop fast enough around here for that to be at all likely. It's only about six hundred feet above sea level here, and we're fully a thousand river miles from the ocean. OP's story is much more likely to be something half remembered and close to real, but slightly off. (Like my own father's story. Close, but probably not quite right.) 

framer wrote: ↑

Aug 11, 2022

Obviously far-fetched, but a great find anyway. Thanks for sharing

Yeah that's what I was leading towards!

It is down this way, yes. And there's just enough real information in it to make it interesting. The North Missouri was a predecessor of the Wabash. There is a private subscription library called the Mercantile Library that was already prominent at the time. (Associated with UMSL now.) They really did have to dig pretty deep for the piers to the Ead's Bridge, which was really built at that time. Big Mound was really torn down around then and was approximately on the site of the North Missouri/Wabash/Norfolk Southern in north city. And there's really plenty of caves, and people love speculating about associations between the Mississippians and other civilizations, but I fear this is the stuff of "Ancient Aliens." (All the connection to ancient Assyrians is even less plausible than the cave/tunnel connecting mounds under the river. That thing would have been seven miles long! Which is longer than the Moffat Tunnel, which was the world's longest when it opened. In 1928.) Anyway . . . it really is a neat little article.