Canadian River Wagon Bridge

The Canadian River floods. Bridges built here in 1888 and 1889 both washed out. In 1915 Hemphill County voters approved a more permanent crossing, and the bridge finished in 1916 had seventeen pin-connected Parker through trusses, each 155 feet long and 27 feet high, for a length of 2,635 feet. Its 16-foot roadway rested on concrete piers with steel footings driven 65 feet into the riverbed.

In 1923 high water cut a new channel around the north end and widened the river, and the county paid the Austin Bridge Company of Dallas to add four more trusses of the same size. That made the bridge 3,255 feet long, the longest pin-connected bridge in Texas, and the longest metal truss bridge in the state until the Rainbow Bridge between Orange and Port Arthur opened in 1938. By the 1950s its single lane was too narrow for passing traffic, and in 1953 a new concrete and steel highway bridge, paid for with state highway funds, bypassed it. The old bridge was left without a deck, carrying a natural gas pipeline, and was recorded by the Historic American Engineering Record.

Canadian did not let it go. A committee of residents raised money and matching grants, laid a new plank deck and side rails, and after five years of work reopened it on July 1, 2000 as a walking and biking trail over the river and its wetlands. The walk across and back is about a mile and a quarter.