Sarto Old Iron Bridge

Austin Brothers of Texas built the Sarto bridge in 1916 as a steel swing truss, meant to open for boats on Bayou des Glaises. The swing mechanism no longer works, and the span has gone essentially unused as a swing bridge since the waterway was declared unnavigable in 1930, though it did its job in the 1927 flood, when Big Bend residents used it to get out. It is now open only to pedestrians and carries the Atchafalaya Water Heritage Trail over the bayou beside the Big Bend Museum.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 14 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.
• Tunica-Biloxi Museum — 16 mi
  The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana's own museum at Marksville, built around the Tunica Treasure that the tribe won back in court.
• Avoyelles Parish Courthouse: Solomon Northup Marker — 17 mi
  The Marksville courthouse where Solomon Northup was freed in January 1853, with a marker and a 2026 bronze that shows him rising from the mud.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 31 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.

More markers nearby

• Bayou Des Glaises — steps away
• Big Bend: Development of a Community — steps away
• A Historic Landmark — steps away
• Battle Of Yellow Bayou — 6.4 mi