The swinging bridge in Tishomingo State Park hangs a walkway of wooden planks from wire cables across Bear Creek, and it was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the late 1930s, among the Corps' last projects on the park. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History holds 112 photographs of those final projects, collected by Clifford Green Worsham, the senior engineering foreman, which show CCC workers in 1939 and 1940 building a swimming pool, a dam and the bridge. The park lies astride the Natchez Trace Parkway around milepost 304, and the bridge is about 1.2 km east of the parkway. Tishomingo was the fifth of ten state parks the CCC built in Mississippi, according to its National Register nomination.
CCC Company 3497 began work in April 1935, and the park was run under the Mississippi Forestry Commission. The Corps built in the Rustic style from native stone, and the historic district listed on the National Register counts seventeen buildings, three structures and a designed landscape of stone paths, steps, seats, fountains and culverts, with a CCC dam and lake. The swinging bridge is one of the three structures, reached by stone steps to stone entrances at each end.
The span is nearly 200 feet, and its suspenders run on the slant in a zigzag rather than hanging straight down. Worsham was born in Corinth in 1917 and took his engineering degree at the University of Mississippi in 1939. After Navy service in the Second World War he returned to Corinth and formed a construction company with his two brothers; he died in 2009.
Getting there
34.6052, -88.1796
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