The Albion Bridge: The Last Wooden Highway Bridge

The bridge you are crossing is the last two-lane wooden highway bridge in the California state system. Everything else like it is gone, replaced by concrete and steel across the decades since World War Two. This one is still here.

The Albion River Bridge was built in nineteen forty-four, which means it was built under wartime materials constraints. The construction used salvaged wood treated with copper azole preservative and incorporated a steel center truss lifted from a bridge on the South Fork of the Feather River that was being decommissioned. The resulting structure is nine hundred sixty-nine feet long and carries California State Route One across the Albion River on timbers that are now more than eighty years old.

Caltrans has proposed replacing this bridge with a concrete span multiple times since the nineteen eighties. The concrete bridge would be safer by current engineering standards, lighter to maintain, and would feel like every other bridge on this stretch of coast. It would also be indistinguishable from every other bridge on this stretch of coast.

Community opposition has defeated every replacement proposal. In July of twenty seventeen, the bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which gave it a layer of formal protection that community organizing alone could not provide.

The bridge was kept alive by argument. The argument has lasted more than forty years. The wood is still holding.