Grantsville and the Bridge That Amazed a Nation
Near Wisp, Maryland
Grantsville sits in a fold of the Alleghenies where Amish and Mennonite settlers arrived early on, calling the place Little Crossing for the ford over the Casselman River. The National Road arrived between eighteen eleven and eighteen nineteen, and the village grew up to serve the wagons and stagecoaches streaming west. The centerpiece was the Casselman River Bridge, finished in eighteen fourteen, an eighty-foot single stone arch that was the largest of its kind in America at the time.
Engineers even designed it long enough to let a canal pass beneath it, in case the waterway ever crossed the mountains. The National Road carried generations of travelers over it. When a newer steel highway bridge was built nearby in nineteen thirty-three, the old stone arch lost its traffic, and it was later closed to cars and turned over to walkers.
It still stands today.
