Veterans Memorial Bridge, also called the Beverly-Salem Bridge, is a fixed-span roadway crossing of the Danvers River carrying

Massachusetts Route 1A Route 1A is a north–south state highway in Massachusetts. It is an alternate route to U.S. 1 with three signed sections and two unsigned sections where the highway is concurrent with its parent. Due to the reconfiguration of tunnel interchan ...

between Salem and

Beverly, Massachusetts Beverly is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, and a suburb of Boston. The population was 42,670 at the time of the 2020 United States Census. A resort, residential, and manufacturing community on the Massachusetts North Shore, Beverly incl ...

. It opened in 1997, replacing a previous historic steel bridge at the same location.

History

The Veterans Memorial Bridge is located at the site of the historic Essex Bridge. Originally a ferry crossed the Danvers River at the location from 1636 to 1788, then the first bridge was built. Rebuilt several times until 1896 when a steel

pony truss A truss bridge is a bridge whose load-bearing superstructure is composed of a truss, a structure of connected elements, usually forming triangular units. The connected elements (typically straight) may be stressed from tension, compression, o ...

swing bridge with trestle approaches was constructed by the county. It was constructed by the

King Bridge Company The King Iron Bridge & Manufacturing Company was a late-19th-century bridge building company located in Cleveland, Ohio. It was founded by Zenas King (1818–1892) in 1858 and subsequently managed by his sons, James A. King and Harry W. King ...

Cleveland Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the United States, U.S. U.S. state, state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along ...

Ohio Ohio () is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. Of the List of states and territories of the United States, fifty U.S. states, it is the List of U.S. states and territories by area, 34th-l ...

. Part of the cost of the 1896 bridge was covered by the

Bay State Street Railway The Bay State Street Railway Company was a horse-drawn and electric streetcar railroad operated on the streets of Boston, Massachusetts and communities directly north (stretching into New Hampshire) and south (extending into Rhode Island) of t ...

, which operated on a track over the bridge until 1934. The trolley tracks were later removed. By the early 1990s the steel bridge had deteriorated to a point where it had to be demolished. It was replaced by the current span in 1997.

Current span

The Veterans Memorial Bridge contains seven main spans with the longest measuring 220 feet. It also contains four approach spans ranging between 60 and 160 feet in length. The current bridge is typical of

MassDOT The Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) oversees roads, public transit, aeronautics, and transportation licensing and registration in the US state of Massachusetts. It was created on November 1, 2009, by the 186th Session of t ...

's preference for use of

weathering steel Weathering steel, often referred to by the genericised trademark COR-TEN steel and sometimes written without the hyphen as corten steel, is a group of steel alloys which were developed to eliminate the need for painting, and form a stable r ...

for steel bridges.MassDOT Bridge Data Sheets
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References

{{Reflist Bridges completed in 1896 Bridges completed in 1997 Monuments and memorials in Massachusetts Beam bridges in the United States Road bridges in Massachusetts Steel bridges in the United States Bridges in Essex County, Massachusetts

History

Current span

See also

References