100 Years Ago: The Free Bridge, the
Dollarway, and Arkansas Roads,
Part IV
By
David Trulock
Part III of this series briefly described the
longtime efforts to build a bridge across the Arkansas River at Pine
Bluff—efforts that ultimately resulted in the construction of Jefferson
County’s Free Bridge during 1914 and early 1915. That story ended in April 1915 with a rather
curious situation. The bridge itself was ready for wagon and automobile traffic.
It was even deemed to be one of the finest in the country and “certainly the
best that spans the Arkansas River” by the Corps of Engineers inspector who
approved it. But the roads on both ends
of the bridge at that time were dirt roads with tree stumps still to be removed
and grading and ditching still to be done.
The bridge had been constructed using the river to transport materials,
equipment and men.
The engineer who inspected and approved the bridge was
Major Alfred B. Putnam, a Massachusetts native and West Point graduate who had
served in numerous locations in the United States and as commander of the
Battalion of Engineers at Fort DeRussy, Hawaii. Just prior to being stationed
in Little Rock, he had served in the Panama Canal Zone. (The Canal was
completed in 1914.) With that
background, Major Putnam was unlikely to be engaging in hyperbole in his
statement regarding the Free Bridge. But
he was covering a lot of miles of river in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and
Colorado in making it.
If we confine ourselves to the Arkansas River
within the borders of Arkansas, the wagon and automobile bridges existing at
the time were in Fort Smith and Little Rock. One of these, the Baring Cross
railroad bridge, built in 1873, had been modified to also carry autos and
wagons. There were of course also railroad-only bridges at Little Rock and Fort
Smith and at other locations along the Arkansas River by 1915. One reason for the Free Bridge to be a better bridge
than any of these was that it had been designed from the beginning to carry
rail traffic down the center plus automobile and wagon traffic on the
cantilevered “driveways” along its sides.
At the time the Free Bridge opened there was a
bridge of this same design being built over the Mississippi River, connecting
Memphis and West Memphis. The Harahan Bridge, as it came to be called, opened
for rail traffic in 1916 and for wagon and auto traffic in 1917.
These types of bridges were not uncommon at the
time, but were usually planned and built by railroad companies, using whatever
local financial help they could find for building the driveways (also called
wagonways) along the sides. As discussed
in Part I in this series, the Free Bridge was not associated with a rail line
and was never used to carry rail traffic, although north-south rail lines were planned
by various Pine Bluff investors before and after the bridge was built. These
planned railroad companies were meant to compete with the established east-west
routes of the Cotton Belt and Missouri Pacific, and at one time the Cotton Belt
line itself expressed an interest in expanding its operations to the north by using
the Free Bridge tracks. None of these plans ever reached fruition, and the railroad
tracks were removed from the bridge in 1926.
The tracks were helpful in one way, however. Cass Ussery, the longtime caretaker of the
Free Bridge and operator of its lift span, used a handcar on the tracks from
1915 to 1926 in order to quickly get from one end of the bridge to the
other. (Mr. Ussery, not a man to be
trifled with, will appear again in a later installment of this series.) There was also some serendipity associated
with the middle section of the bridge even after the tracks were removed. Farm equipment, which got bigger as time
passed, was able to use the center section of the bridge, as could
wider-than-normal loads carried by large trucks.
Unlike the bridges for automobiles and wagons at
Fort Smith and Little Rock, the Pine Bluff bridge that had been planned and
discussed for so long wound up not being in the city or even on the edge of the
city. Building a bridge to replace the ferry from the northern edge of downtown
to Boyd’s Point was what most people expected would be done, but engineers who
scouted locations for a bridge wisely cautioned that the Arkansas River’s
extraordinary loop southward at Pine Bluff made the future location of the
river here uncertain. A straighter portion of the river six miles north of the
city was eventually chosen for the bridge.
Although a lot of thought was given to the location
of the bridge, not much planning was done in regard to connecting roads—at
least not until the bridge had already been built. The ferry from the city’s
downtown area to Boyd’s Point was still in use after the Free Bridge opened,
and there was apparently little pressure to get roads built on either end of
the bridge. It wasn’t until August 1915 that
a petition to build a macadam road to the bridge was signed by a majority of
landowners along the route and was filed with the county court. This was the
first step in forming a Road Improvement District. The petition called for construction of a 4 ½
mile long macadam road to the bridge, starting from the intersection of Cedar
(now University Drive) and Saracen streets. This location was coincidentally
only a few hundred yards east of the southern end of the then-new Dollarway
Road at Pullen Street near the entrance to Bellwood Cemetery.
Because of numerous floods, including a fairly
large one in 1916, the Arkansas River did indeed change its course at Pine
Bluff over the years. Finally, in 1965, during the construction of the
McClellan-Kerr navigation system, the formerly notorious Boyd Point Cut-off was
dredged to create a new river channel. This
cut-off is where a Corps of Engineers levee was illegally dynamited during the
1908 flood to prevent the Courthouse from being swept away. The citizenry of Pine Bluff had years earlier
requested the levee be built to keep the river flowing next to the city; the
Corps refused the city’s request in 1908 to remove the levee. So some citizens—to this day not publicly
named—took matters in their own hands.
When Boyd Point Cut-off was dredged in 1965, the
former river channel—which by then had receded several miles northeast of the
city—was simultaneously closed off, creating the Port of Pine Bluff and Lake
Langhoffer. Although late 19th Century and early 20th Century residents could
not have imagined Pine Bluff existing without a steamboat landing at the foot
of the downtown business district, changing the course of the river turned out
to be a good thing for the city.
Epilogue
Major Alfred Burpee Putnam, the inspector of the
Free Bridge, died of malaria on June 8, 1915, in Little Rock. He was 37 years old.
He was survived by his wife, Myrtie Maud (Harris) Putnam, and their 15 year old
son, Melville H. Putnam.
Little Rock’s original Baring Cross Bridge, along
with its added-on auto and wagon “highway,” was washed away by the flood of
1927. A new railroad-only Baring Cross
Bridge built by Missouri Pacific opened in 1929. The lift span of this bridge had
to be modified in 1967 to suit the requirements of the McClellan-Kerr
navigation project. Those same requirements plus increased highway traffic on
the Free Bridge led to its replacement by a new bridge in 1972. However, the Free Bridge—vindicating Major
Putnam’s judgment—not only survived the flood of 1927 but also provided a safe
refuge for many people during it.
The Harahan Bridge is still in use as a railroad
bridge. A project to convert the old wagonways along its sides into bicycle and
pedestrian usage, connecting Main Street in Memphis with Broadway in West
Memphis, is scheduled to be completed this year.
Published in the Spring 2016 issue of the Jefferson County Historical Quarterly. An article I wrote using excerpts from this Free Bridge and Dollarway series was published in the online version of the Pine Bluff Commercial just before Hillary Clinton's visit in February.
