Zanesville, Ohio, The Y-Bridge Town

Zanesville sits at the confluence of the Licking and Muskingum Rivers and owes its existence to Ebenezer Zane, the frontiersman Congress hired, and allowed to buy key river-crossing tracts, to hack Zane's Trace through the Ohio wilderness. Zane passed the land to his son-in-law John McIntire, who platted the town in seventeen ninety-nine. By eighteen fourteen, the town had a solution to a tricky engineering problem: where to bridge two rivers at once.

The answer was the Y-Bridge, a three-pronged span that lets you cross from one bank and still be on the same side of the water you started on. Amelia Earhart called it the feature that made Zanesville the most recognizable city in the country. The current Y-Bridge, the fifth version, opened in nineteen eighty-four and is part of a bridge site added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-three.