Smith's Bridge
New Castle County, Beaver Valley. Built 1839, burned 1961, rebuilt as a faithful reproduction in 2002, 154 ft. long. A Burr truss bridge over the Brandywine Creek near Isaac Smith's mill.
Smith's Bridge crosses Brandywine Creek in the Beaver Valley area of New Castle County, near where 19th-century miller Isaac Smith once operated his mill along the creek. The original single-lane, three-span covered bridge went up in 1839, stretching 143 feet, and carried traffic for well over a century, reinforced with steel beams and additional piers in 1956 to keep it serviceable as vehicle loads grew heavier.
That original structure met a violent end in October 1961, when arsonists burned it down. An open-deck wooden bridge filled the gap by 1962, but decades later Delaware decided to bring back the historic look of the crossing: a faithful reproduction covered bridge, built in the character of the 1839 original and incorporating genuine Burr trusses, was completed in 2002, this time with a steel-reinforced deck engineered to handle modern traffic loads. The project brought together Delaware DOT for engineering and project management, Eastern States Construction Service as general contractor, Pocopson Industries for the timber framing, and High Steel Structures for the steel components — a multi-firm effort to recreate, as closely as modern engineering allows, one of Delaware's lost 19th-century landmarks.
