The Historic Caddo Lake Drawbridge

John Alexander Low Waddell of Waddell and Harrington drew the vertical-lift design, and the Midland Bridge Company of Kansas City built it for the Caddo Parish Police Jury in 1914. The center span was meant to rise for tall oil equipment, but it has been inoperable since the 1940s, after the state highway department took the bridge and removed the counterweights. By the late 1970s the narrow deck forced alternating one-lane traffic. Parish ownership returned on October 3, 1995, with a rededication that month, and the National Register listed it on October 18, 1996.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Oil and Gas Museum — 4.0 mi
  The state's first public petroleum museum in Oil City, on the 1905 Caddo Parish strike and the 1911 over-water well on Caddo Lake, with a derrick and a log-jam exhibit.
• Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 12 mi
  Wetlands and woods on part of a former ammunition plant, now a refuge for wood ducks, prothonotary warblers and alligator snapping turtles, with four easy trails and a free visitor center on a Ramsar lake.
• Caddo Lake State Park — 13 mi
  A Civilian Conservation Corps park on the Texas shore of Caddo Lake, where the Caddo told of a lake made by wind-driven water and visitors now paddle Big Cypress Bayou past moss-hung bald cypress.
• Shreveport Water Works Museum — 17 mi
  An 1887 brick pumping station on McNeill Street where Worthington steam pumps ran until 1980, now a free museum and a National Historic Landmark.

More markers nearby

• First Over Water Oil Well — 2.3 mi
• Caddo Lake — 2.4 mi
• Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter — 2.4 mi
• Trees City Office & Bank — 3.3 mi