Jay Street Bridge — Lock Haven's Covered River Crossing

The bridge at Jay Street in Lock Haven has been rebuilt more than once, but the original crossing commissioned in eighteen fifty-two was remarkable: an eight-hundred-foot covered wooden span connecting Lock Haven to Lockport across the West Branch Susquehanna. The E. Kirkbride Company built it for the Lock Haven Bridge Company, and a toll house stood at the foot of the bridge on the Lock Haven side.

The crossing served the community through the canal era, the lumber boom, and into the twentieth century. In nineteen nineteen the wooden bridge was destroyed by fire and replaced with an iron bridge. The modern bridge spanning the same crossing is still called the Jay Street Bridge by local residents, carrying the name of a structure that disappeared more than a century ago.