Now in her ninety-fourth year, Laura Merrill of Wellesley, Massachusetts, is setting the record straight on a small but significant role she played in one of the great engineering triumphs of the turn of the century:
Recently, in going over a scrapbook I kept when I was a young woman, I came across several newspaper clippings from the years 1906 and 1907. One of them reads, in part: “For the first time since the world began, a woman walked beneath the waters of the East River yesterday and she was Miss Emmeline V. Smith, a girl of 19…”

Now, sixty-nine years later, I would like to say that Miss Smith was not the first woman to walk through the East River subway tunnel. I was.

My husband, Ogden Merrill, was the engineer superintending the Manhattan side of this first railway tunnel under the East River. It was being built by the New York Tunnel Company to ease the heavy flow of traffic between Manhattan and Brooklyn. For four years the work had gone on night and day. And for over a year, first as Ogden’s fiancée and then as his bride, I followed the progress closely. On December i, 1906, a steel pipe, six inches in diameter, was forced through the tunnel from the Brooklyn end, hopefully to meet one from the Manhattan side. When the measurements were taken, it was found that the lines of the bores came to within one-tenth of an inch alignment. There was much rejoicing. And it was then I began to coax my husband to allow me to walk through the tunnel with him. Finally, when he saw I was in earnest, he consented. The day for my adventure was set for December 24, 1906- a sort of Christmas Eve celebration. Although I personally encountered no catastrophe, the (rip was not without danger. As the Times reported on December 9, 1906: ”… not more than a dozen lives lost which is a good record considering all the hazards.”

The tunnel extends nearly one mile under the river from Battery Park to Joralemon Street, Brooklyn. When we arrived at my husband’s office in New York, the men equipped me for the journey with sweaters, an oilskin coat, and an old hat. Several pairs of socks and a pair of felt slippers were presented to me to help keep the smallest boots they could find from falling off my feet.

At last we were ready to descend the shaft at the Battery entrance. We stood on a platform without sides or railings, which served as the elevator, and we shot down into the bowels of the earth. I was terrified but didn’t let on. At the bottom of the shaft we were taken into the air-compressor chamber, known as a lock. It looked like a huge water heater lying on its side. The seats inside ran lengthwise.