The bridge carrying the Natchez Trace Parkway over Tennessee Highway 96 west of Franklin spans 1,572 feet between its abutments, 1,648 including them, and stands about 155 feet above the floor of Birdsong Hollow. It was designed by the Figg Engineering Group, built by PCL Civil Constructors, and finished in the spring of 1994; the arches closed that March and traffic crossed by June. It was the first precast, segmentally constructed concrete arch bridge erected in the United States. Its two arches were assembled from 122 hollow precast boxes, each about ten feet long and weighing between 29 and 45 tons, cast about eight miles away in Franklin and trucked out to the valley. The deck above them came from 196 more precast segments, post-tensioned together.
The thing worth knowing about it is what is not there. Almost every arch bridge carries its deck on a row of columns or a solid wall standing on the arch. This one has none. The deck bears on each arch at two points only, a pair of bearings set forty-five feet either side of the crown, so the arch and the roadway read as two separate thin curves from below. The arches were built out from their piers as balanced cantilevers held by temporary cable stays, a method the contractor substituted for the falsework towers in the original drawings, which kept construction off the steep north slope of the hollow. It won a Presidential Design Award in 1995 and a Federal Highway Administration Award of Merit in 1996.
Getting there
35.9858, -86.9928
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
