Bluff Dale Suspension Bridge

The bridge is not quite what its name says. Wikipedia, citing a 2003 engineering study, calls it cable-stayed: the deck hangs from stay cables running to iron-pipe towers, a pattern from designer Edwin Elijah Runyon's first U.S. patent. It names this and the Barton Creek Bridge at Huckabay as the two known Runyon designs. Its cables were twisted by hand. The 1934 move stretched the span from 200 to 225 feet. The National Register listed it in 1977 and renamed it Bluff Dale Bridge in 2016; vehicles were barred in 1989.

What the plaque says

Bluff Dale Suspension Bridge For at least 20 years vehicles had to ford the Paluxy River to reach Bluff Dale and points west. Wagon traffic increased after the Fort Worth & Rio Grande Railroad line reached the town in 1889. This iron bridge began to serve the public by spanning the Paluxy about 1891, on the main access road that became State Highway 10 and later U.S. 377. By 1933 arterial highway travel demanded a wider bridge. In 1934 authorities moved the "swinging" bridge 1.5 miles upstream where it serves local traffic. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dinosaur Valley State Park — 14 mi
  Theropod and sauropod trackways of about 113 million years ago in the bed of the Paluxy River, a National Natural Landmark where R. T. Bird found the first distinct sauropod tracks in 1937.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 15 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
• Acton State Historic Site — 21 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.
• Dublin Bottling Works — 26 mi
  The Erath County plant that bottled Dr Pepper with cane sugar from 1891 until a 2012 settlement ended its Dr Pepper license, and that still makes its own sodas the same way.

More markers nearby

• Old Public Water Well — 0.3 mi
• Morgan Mill Tabernacle — 8.6 mi
• Cornelia Graves — 13 mi
• First Christian Church of Granbury — 14 mi