Wiggin's Ferry Company last active years

The Eads Bridge offered two sets of rail tracks for the Union Railway Company of Illinois to operate in the business of transferring freight across the Mississippi River.  Before the bridge could handle the rail traffic terminals and transfer points had to be built on both sides of the river.  Building the facilities took almost fifteen years.  During that time freight continued to be shipped by ferry services like the Wiggins Ferry Company.  However, the company was surviving on borrowed time, because once operational, the bridge could transfer greater amounts of freight in less time.

In the first years of operation the Eads Bridge failed to attract enough business to operate.  In 1875 the bridge was bankrupt and in 1878 the St. Louis Bridge Company purchased the bridge at public auction for $2 million.  In 1880 the notorious Jay Gould, ever interested in his railroad holdings received the bridge under one of his holdings.

Nevertheless, the Wiggin's Company did what it could to survive.  In 1885 it leased the Madison County Ferry from the East St. Louis Transfer Company.  With the greater capacity it gained and the pressure from the bridge, the company lowered its freight rates from nine cents per hundred pounds to five cents, matching the bridge rate.  As a further incentive the ferry service offered a barrel of whiskey to regular freight patrons.  These moves secured almost all of the railroad freight transfer business for the Wiggin's Company.  Meanwhile Jay Gould was consolidating his control over the Eads Bridge.  He established an "arbitrary" or a monopoly on bridge traffic and the rates he could charge for use of the bridge.  In 1886 the St. Louis Merchants Exchange launched plans to build the Merchants Bridge to break the Gould monopoly.  The Merchants Bridge opened in 1890 but survived only three years before a lack of services and accessibility ran the bridge into bankruptcy.

Within four years of Wiggins Ferry Company's lower freight rates Gould struck the ferry service a hard blow when he finished the St. Louis terminal facilities and formed the Terminal Railroad Association in 1889.  Railroads participating in the Association included the Wabash Railroad, the Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Missouri Pacific, the St. Louis, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, and the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railroad.  The TRRA proved the winner in the bridge competition when it purchased the Merchants Bridge and its debt in 1893.

In 1896 the Wiggin's Ferry Company had only one-third of the business it held in 1882.  In the same year a tornado struck the area and destroyed large parts of St. Louis and East St. Louis.  The Wiggin's Company lost five ferry-boats, all of their wharf, and all of their facilities on Bloody Island.  However, the Company persisted and continued to compete with the Eads Bridge.  Part of the ferry company's survival came from outside interests like the Rock Island Railroad that was not part of the Terminal Railroad Association and sought a means to transfer freight into St. Louis.  In 1902 the Rock Island Railroad attempted to buy Wiggin's Ferry Company to secure an entrance to the city, but the Terminal Railroad Association admitted Rock Island and then purchased Wiggin's Ferry Company through its subsidiary the Mercantile Company, to prevent a similar scenario in the future.  After the Terminal Railroad Association made the Wiggin's Company a wholly owned subsidiary the ferry operation continued to transfer freight until 1930.