Posted January 15, 2011, by D. W. Adams (weetbixmarmite [at] yahoo [dot] com)
This bridge was always a major landmark to me when I was a kid on our trips back home to Tennessee when we were living in Arkansas. I never knew that it was a lift bridge until much later. The story goes that almost as soon as it was built, an earthquake and flood shifted the channel of the St. Francis River slightly, enough to render the lift span unusable to river traffic, so it was never even used.b
This bridge was always a major landmark to me when I was a kid on our trips back home to Tennessee when we were living in Arkansas. I never knew that it was a lift bridge until much later. The story goes that almost as soon as it was built, an earthquake and flood shifted the channel of the St. Francis River slightly, enough to render the lift span unusable to river traffic, so it was never even used.b