Pennypack Creek Bridge: Oldest Road Bridge in the Nation

The bridge crossing Pennypack Creek at Frankford Avenue has been carrying travelers since around sixteen ninety-seven, making it widely recognized as the oldest surviving roadway bridge in the United States. Colonial builders set its three stone arches at a Lenape trail crossing, and the structure soon became a critical link on the King's Highway, one of early America's most important long-distance roads. In seventeen eighty-one, American and French troops bound for Yorktown marched across it on what historians call the Rochambeau Route.

It was widened in eighteen ninety-three for streetcars and again in nineteen fifty for automobiles. The upstream face is essentially unchanged from the seventeenth century. For more than three hundred years, through wars, industrialization, and suburban sprawl, this quiet stone span has stayed in service.