Red Bridge is built to carry Mountain Loop Highway over South Fork Stillaguamish River (Snohomish County) in 1954.

  • By Priscilla Long
  • Posted 9/20/2007
  • HistoryLink.org Essay 8297
See Additional Media

In 1954, Red Bridge is built to span South Fork Stillaguamish River in Snohomish County. The 160-foot-long steel-truss bridge is part of the Mountain Loop Highway and crosses the river between Silverton and Verlot. It is painted red in honor of its predecessor railroad bridge that had rusted to the color red and was thus informally called "Red Bridge."

The bridge is one of the last Pratt/Parker through-truss bridges built in the state. It is a steel riveted bridge. A through-truss bridge is one on which traffic travels between the supporting trusses, at the level of the bottom chords. (On a bridge a chord is a horizontal truss member.) The Pratt/Parker truss is a particular configuration of the individual steel components of the truss.

The bridge was designed by the Bureau of Public Roads office in San Francisco and built by Peter Kiewit Sons Company with steel fabricated by United States Steel located in Gary, Indiana. It forms part of the Mountain Loop Highway, which was built on the right of way of the Everett and Monte Cristo Railway, built in 1892 to haul gold copper, lead, and iron ores to smelters in Everett. The tracks of the railroad were removed in 1932.

The bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002 (structure  No. 02000311).

 


Sources:

Craig Holstine and Richard Hobbs, Spanning Washington: Historic Highway Bridges of the Evergreen State (Pullman: WSU Press, 2005), 193; "Red Bridge,: National Register of Historic Places website accessed September 20, 2007 (http://www.nationalregisterofhistoricplaces.com/WA/Snohomish/state.html).


Licensing: This essay is licensed under a Creative Commons license that encourages reproduction with attribution. Credit should be given to both HistoryLink.org and to the author, and sources must be included with any reproduction. Click the icon for more info. Please note that this Creative Commons license applies to text only, and not to images. For more information regarding individual photos or images, please contact the source noted in the image credit.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
Major Support for HistoryLink.org Provided By: The State of Washington | Patsy Bullitt Collins | Paul G. Allen Family Foundation | Museum Of History & Industry | 4Culture (King County Lodging Tax Revenue) | City of Seattle | City of Bellevue | City of Tacoma | King County | The Peach Foundation | Microsoft Corporation, Other Public and Private Sponsors and Visitors Like You