Chain Bridge: The First Crossing of the Potomac
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Virginia
In seventeen ninety-seven, a wooden covered bridge opened across the Potomac River at this location, reportedly backed by the merchants of Georgetown, then a prosperous tobacco port in Maryland. The wooden bridge was, by most accounts, a commercial gambit. Georgetown competed fiercely with Alexandria, Virginia, for the trade flowing down from the Shenandoah Valley and the Virginia interior. A bridge at the falls would let merchants bypass Alexandria entirely and funnel that inland commerce directly to Georgetown's wharves.
The original wooden structure was destroyed and rebuilt multiple times, and eventually replaced with a chain suspension bridge in the early eighteen hundreds, which gave the crossing its lasting name. Chain Bridge stood at one of the most strategically critical points on the Potomac, just above the fall line where river navigation ended.
During the Civil War, Union forces held Chain Bridge as an essential fortified crossing protecting Washington from the Virginia side. Union defenses stood nearby. Today the bridge still carries traffic across the Potomac gorge between Virginia and the District of Columbia, spanning the same narrow rocky gap where the first crossing was built more than two centuries ago.
