The Anthony Wayne Bridge: When Toledo Finally Crossed the River
Near Toledo, Ohio
The Anthony Wayne Bridge, known locally as the High Level Bridge, arcs over the Maumee River in downtown Toledo in a long graceful sweep of steel cable and concrete deck. When it opened in nineteen thirty-one, it was a genuine engineering event. Before it existed, there was no guaranteed way to get across the Maumee River without stopping.
Every bridge that had previously spanned the river at Toledo was a drawbridge, built low enough that boats needed it to open before they could pass. Ice jams and river traffic were constant problems. Ships had collided with bridges. The old Cherry Street Bridge, for decades the main crossing, had been struck by a drifting steamer in March, nineteen oh eight, which knocked a span into the river. Crossing the river in a commercial vehicle was an exercise in patience and uncertainty.
The new bridge solved those problems by going over them. With a main span of seven hundred eighty-five feet and a deck elevated high enough to clear any river traffic without opening, it was designed by the engineering firm of Waddell and Hardesty and built by McClintic-Marshall, the same company that constructed the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor in the same era. The project cost two million six hundred thousand dollars.
The bridge is named after General Anthony Wayne, the Revolutionary War commander who defeated a confederacy of Native nations at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in seventeen ninety-four, just a few miles from where you are now. That battle opened the Maumee Valley to American settlement and began the sequence of events that would eventually produce the city of Toledo.
The American Society of Civil Engineers designated the Anthony Wayne Bridge a historic civil engineering landmark in twenty twenty-two.
