Washington Crossing Bridge on the Delaware River (HISTORY) UPDATED

A little history is prompted by this nice picture of "a bridge on the Delaware River" we found on the web by a local photographer. It is confirmed by the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission as their Washington Crossing Bridge 8 miles (13km) upstream of Trenton. The bridge is named for its location near where General George Washington's army crossed the river from Pennsylvania  on the night of Dec 25/26 1776 in a snowstorm to successfully rout 1400 Hessian mercenaries and British soldiers at Trenton NJ early Dec 26.

Coming after a succession of devastating defeats at the hands of the British in Brooklyn Heights, Fort Washington upper Manhtattan, White Plains NY and Fort Lee NJ, and just a  week before most of the army's enlistments were up, the victory at Trenton, followed quickly by another at Princeton, was regarded as a turning point in the Revolutionary War.

Morale soared.

Washington's army brought their own boats for the famous Christmas 1776 night crossing but their boats made use of the ferry docks on both banks of a private ferry operator, Samuel McConkey.

McConkey sold the ferry business to a Benjamin Taylor in 1777 and when the local traffic gave rise to establishment of a post office on the Pennsylvania bank of the river the tiny settlement around became Taylorsville.

We're drawing on "Bridges Over the Delaware River: a History of Crossings" by Frank T Dale" Rutgers University Press, 2003.

As so often happened in the 19th century as traffic grew the ferry operator wanted to build a toll bridge in place of his ferry when the economics favored it.

A Taylorsville Delaware Bridge Company in 1831 got a charter from the states of PA and NJ allowing the joint stock company to raise $20,000 by issue of shares. The company opened the bridge in 1834 and ferry service ended. It was a six span wooden covered bridge 875ft (267m) long and 23ft (7m) above normal water level.

A history of coping with floods

The history of Delaware River bridges is a history of coping with destructive floods.

This first bridge at Washington Crossing lasted just seven years to Jan 8 1841 when a flood carried the bridge superstucture away, along with other bridges on the river.

The toll bridge company rebuilt the wooden covered bridge at a higher elevation and the second bridge withstood floods until Oct 10 1903.  Again the bridge was reduced to piers. This time the company went broke.

First steel bridge

The first steel truss bridge using 'Warren trusses' was built in 1904 on the original wood bridge's piers, strengthened and heightened. It was financed by a new charter company named "Taylorsville Delaware Bridge and Washington's Crossing Delaware Bridge Company" a name so cumbersome the trading of its stock must have been a tongue twisting business.  Acronym: TDBAWCDBC.

Anti-toll campaign

Local interests began an anti-toll campaign up and down the Delaware River in the early 1920s, it appears, though we've been unable to find any account of who was involved and how they got legislative support. We know the states of PA and NJ formed a Joint Commission for the Elimination of Toll Bridges (JCETB) in 1922. This was a predecessor body to the present Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission. JCETB took over a number of the private toll bridges of the Delaware River and de-tolled them.

JCETB bought the Washington Crossing Bridge from the private TDBAWCDBC for $40,000, Dale writes, on Apr 25 1922.

Supported apparently by taxpayers of the two states, JCETB did repairs and upgrades to the bridge in 1926.

History scant

In 1934 JCETB was replaced by the present Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission, though we can't find any accounts of what motivated this important change - maybe the Depression's tough economic times persuaded state legislators they needed to levy tolls just a decade after they'd been using state powers to eliminate tolls.

Motorization was rapid in the 1920s, the decade in which gasoline taxes were imposed in most states for the support of roads and bridges. Maybe the yield of the state gasoline taxes was insufficient to fund new bridges in the Depresssion so the DRJTBC was formed to replace the JCETB?

Growth of motor vehicle ownership and travel stopped in the 1930s, and most likely also the yield of the gasoline tax.

A history on this transformation from anti-toll JCETB to pro-public toll DRJTBC would be interesting.

DRJTBC

DRJTBC did major repairs 1947 and 1951, Dale writes, apparently using toll revenues from the US1 Trenton-Morrisville toll bridge to support the Washington Crossing Bridge and other detolled privately built bridges.

Debris carried down the river in a flood Aug 15 1955 did serious damage to the Washington  Crossing bridge again. The superstructure doesn't seem to have been completely washed away but it had to be closed for repairs. The bottom chords of several of the trusses were mangled.

The US Army Corps of Engineers threw up a temporary Bailey bridge alongside and took on paying for repairs, Dale writes. The steel truss bridge reopened three months later on Nov 17 1955.

There was extensive structural rehab in 1994, many truss members being replaced with galvanized steel, others cleaned and coated.

DRJTBC says about the 1994 work: "Floor system members and the open steel grid deck were replaced in the first three bays of each end span. All remaining structural steel was blast cleaned, metallized and painted. A new wooden sidewalk was installed and renovations were made at both approaches to the bridge."

The bridge has a 15ft (4.57m) wide vehicle deck just enough for two cars to creep by one another. It has an overhead clearance of only 8ft (2.44m).

There's a weight limit of "3-ton". That "3 tons" is the little used US "short ton" (3x2,000 pounds) which is 2.7 english (2240pd) or metric (2205pd) tons.  An SUV or pickup is about the heaviest vehicle that will meet the weight regulation.

Floods damaged the bridge again in the spring of 2005 and work was done to repair a stone pier whose core was exposed. There was another high flood June 26-28 2006.

Daily traffic 7k

In 2007 Washington Crossing Bridge, DRJTBC reports, did an average daily traffic of 6,900.

DRJTBC now has seven toll bridges and 13 untolled or toll-supported bridges as it classes Washington Crossing Bridge.

One private toll bridge remains at Dingman's Ferry township in the Delaware Water Gap park not far downstream from the I-80 toll bridge of DRJTBC. It's a light steel truss bridge similar in design to Washington Crossing Bridge.

How it avoided falling into the clutches of the JCETB/DRJTBC would be interesting to explore.

see http://www.drjtbc.org/default.aspx?pageid=71

Jim Crawford comments

Jim Crawford executive-director of the E-ZPass IAG and a longtime toll man in New Jersey has these additional points he kindly makes in an email:

"The 'toll supported' bridges were actually maintained by the DRJTBC with funds from the two states until about 1988 or 89 when a new compact covering the Agency was enacted.  In the earlier years the two State DOT's would annually appropriate monies to pay for each of the 'free' bridges but in that year the two States decided that the Agency was properly financed to cover all the costs and full ownership was transferred to it.

"As for the creation of the DRJTBC you can correlate it to the building of the original Route 1 toll bridge and perhaps to the Phillipsburg RT 22  bridge.  These were the first of the new tollbridges.

"Dingman's Ferry is unique in that it has never been abandoned.  The bridge operates on the original ferry charter in a continuously operating company.  It even has some of the original restrictions (like allowing churchgoers free passage on Sundays).  It also closes for a couple of weeks each year for repairs.  Their one toll collector stands in the middle of the road during busy times and takes cash and script tickets from the drivers as they go by." END Jim Crawford's addition.

TOLLROADSnews 2008-11-17 ADDITION BY JIM CRAWFORD 2008-11-28