Bastrop's Old Iron Bridge

Bastrop voted to tax itself for this bridge. In 1921, with motor cars replacing wagons faster than the county could keep up, residents approved a tax increase and the county issued road bonds, and the result opened in January 1924 at a cost of 167,500 dollars. It is 1,285 feet of concrete and steel across the Colorado, carried on three steel through truss spans of 192 feet each, built in the Parker truss style that was standard for Texas river crossings from the 1920s through the 1940s. It is the sort of structure that was once ordinary on every river in the state and is now increasingly rare, because a truss bridge is expensive to maintain and cheap to replace. It was, for its day, an extravagant piece of public spending by a small county on a single crossing. It carried the main road for decades and has since been relieved of that duty, with traffic moved onto newer crossings nearby. The city has been working to convert it into a pedestrian bridge with a deck park on top, which is the fate that surviving trusses of this vintage either get or conspicuously fail to get. At night it is lit, and the view of it from the river bank downstream is the photograph most people take away from Bastrop. It stands a few blocks from the town's historic Main Street, which holds more standing nineteenth century buildings than almost any Texas town of its size.