Trending
If you are attending the Ohio River Sternwheel Festival this weekend, you cannot help but notice the Williamstown Bridge spanning the Ohio River just upstream from the festival. The rather normal-looking bridge replaced the original Williamstown Bridge in 1992.
The original bridge was anything but normal. In fact, it was downright scary.
The original bridge carried traffic over the river from Sept. 1, 1903, until July 17, 1985.
Rising high above the Ohio River, the huge blue bridge, with its irregular shape, looked more like a roller coaster than something designed to link two cities.
The bridge was the brainchild of several local businessmen who formed a company to raise money for the construction of the span. Neither the states of Ohio nor West Virginia wanted to pay for it, so once it was constructed, it would be paid for with tolls. The bridge replaced a series of ferry boats that operated between the two towns. Since it was being built by businessmen it was important for it to land in Ohio in the business district. It touched down in Marietta on Second Street mid-block between Ohio and Greene streets in the heart of the 1900 business district. To accomplish this, two turns would be built into the approach on the Ohio side. The approach went down the middle of the 100 block of Third Street before turning toward Second Street.
Because of the need to keep the river open during construction the bridge would be the first in the country to span an inland river using cantilever construction. The southern span would be built using temporary bracing, while the Ohio side would be built out from the piers with the already constructed portions serving as a counterweight until the span met in the middle over the river channel.
The 2,440-foot bridge sat on five piers that were made from stones cut from a hillside near Ohio 550. Two of those piers were reused on the current bridge. Street cars also used the bridge, and when they got larger the bridge had to be reinforced to support the heavy weight. Monongahela-West Penn Traction Company bought the bridge in 1917. The bridge was sold to the State Road Commission of West Virginia in 1937, who eliminated the toll a few years later. In 1939, the decking, made of 2x4s, caught fire, closing the bridge for 203 days to replace 790 feet of burned decking with a steel grid, and repair the steel beams that were damaged. It would be 1948 before all the wood was replaced. A fully loaded gasoline tanker broke through the timbers in July just before all the decking was replaced, causing a 12 foot by five-foot hole.
The steel grid was covered by concrete at some point before I started driving across it in the 1970s. A little bit of rain would make it extremely slick. I, and every other driver in the Mid-Ohio Valley, would slide around the two curves that were designed for horses and buggies, not the boats that passed for cars in the 1970s.
I happened to be getting ice cream at the levee when they closed the bridge for good, and shot a photo of the bridge being welded shut for the last time. That photo can be seen on page 2 of today's paper. I was also in the Williamstown High School gym a year later when Arch Moore, the governor of West Virginia, promised to "blast the old bridge off the piers and have a new one in place in 18 months." By that point residents on both sides of the river were accustomed to the bridge letting us down after numerous closings for one issue or another.
As politicians tend to do, he over-promised and under-delivered. For the next seven years, people in Marietta would detour over the interstate to get to Vienna and Parkersburg, with the eventual construction of the current bridge providing entertainment for people eating their lunch by the river as they watched beam after beam being raised into place. Only two of the old piers were salvageable, with the rest of them being cast to look like sandstone even though they were built from concrete, some of which was trucked to the middle of the river by barges that formed a temporary bridge. The resulting bridge is a continuous truss span, the 28th longest such span in the country. It's nothing flashy, but it has been providing a drama-free connection between the two states for 32 years now.
The new bridge has a much gentler approach into Ohio and ends up at Fifth and Greene streets. Planners had the foresight to include steps from Ohio Street to the sidewalk, a feature that years later would tie into the Ohio River Trail perfectly.
Art Smith is online manager of The Times. He can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com