Recently in bridges Category

Brig. General Herman Haupt

I enjoyed the talk on the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Civil War given recently by Ivan E. Frantz, Jr. at the York Civil War Round Table. I was especially impressed by Brig. General Herman Haupt and his fantastic engineering of railroad bridges and the speedy repairs his men made to the bridges destroyed by the Confederate invaders of York County.

Wondering, as always, if he had any other York County area connections, I did a little searching. Turns out, he certainly did.

York Furnace Bridge, c.1856.

I only knew of one photo that showed any remnants of the 1855-1857 bridge at York Furnace. That photo, perhaps taken in the 1890s, showed the remaining piers on the island.

Click here for the previous post and column on the bridge.

After reading my column about the bridge in the York Sunday News, a friend gave a copy of a much earlier photo to the York County Heritage Trust Library/Archives. It is shown above.

The photo above could have been taken no later than early fall of 1856, as there are still leaves on the trees. The bridge was destroyed by ice in February 1857 and never rebuilt.

York Furnace Bridge piers, probably in the 1890s.

Residents of "the lower end" of York and Lancaster counties thought they could beat winter weather in the 1850s by building a bridge across the Susquehanna River at York Furnace.

The Lancaster Examiner of November 20, 1855 celebrated the opening of the bridge. The paper said that the York County people of Fawn, Lower Chanceford, and Peach Bottom would no longer be cut off from commerce in the winter, when the Susquehanna and Tidewater canal was closed and roads were bad to York. Now they could easily get to Lancaster to do their buying and selling.

The York Furnace bridge was to be an integral part of a state road system stretching across four counties from Gettysburg to Chester County.

That very weather they were trying to bypass was the final nemisis of the bridge. The wooden bridge across a narrow part of the Susquehanna was no match for first, wind, and then ice, that came roaring down the river.

See my recent York Sunday News column below for the story of the ill-fated bridge at York Furnace.

This photo may show the ice that carried away the remaining bridge piers in the early 1900s. The red circle marks men standing on the ice, giving you an idea of the size of the ice blocks.