Frankford Avenue Bridge: America's Oldest Road Bridge

Near here, carrying traffic over Pennypack Creek in Philadelphia's Holmesburg neighborhood, stands the oldest road bridge in the United States still open to traffic. The Frankford Avenue Bridge was built in sixteen ninety-seven, making it older than the nation it now serves by nearly eighty years.

It was built at the request of William Penn to connect his Pennsbury estate to the growing city of Philadelphia along what was then called the King's Highway. The three-span stone arch structure stretches seventy-three feet across the creek. Local masons built it so well that the bridge has carried continuous traffic for more than three hundred twenty-five years. The American Society of Civil Engineers named it a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in nineteen seventy.

The bridge has witnessed an extraordinary run of American history. In seventeen eighty-nine, George Washington crossed it on his way north to New York City, then the capital of the new nation, for his first presidential inauguration. For nearly a century after it was built, virtually every traveler moving between Philadelphia and the northern colonies would have clattered across these same stones.

Today the bridge carries Frankford Avenue, designated as United States Route Thirteen, over the same creek and through the same park it has served since the end of the seventeenth century. Cars cross it every day without any idea they are driving over something that would have been old when the Revolution was fought. There is no sign, no ceremony, no monument adequate to what this plain stone arch quietly represents: the oldest piece of road infrastructure in active use in America.