Veterans Memorial Bridge, also called the Beverly-Salem Bridge, is a fixed-span roadway bridge crossing the Danvers River carrying

Massachusetts Route 1A Route 1A is a north–south state highway in Massachusetts, United States. It is an alternate route to U.S. 1 with three signed sections and two unsigned sections where the highway is concurrent with its parent. Due to the reconfiguration o ...

between

Salem Salem may refer to: Places Canada * Salem, Ontario, various places Germany * Salem, Baden-Württemberg, a municipality in the Bodensee district ** Salem Abbey (Reichskloster Salem), a monastery * Salem, Schleswig-Holstein Israel * Salem (B ...

and

Beverly, Massachusetts Beverly is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States, and a suburb of Boston. The population was 42,670 at the time of the 2020 United States census. A resort, residential, and manufacturing community on the Massachusetts North Sho ...

. It opened in 1996, replacing the historic Essex Bridge at the same location.

History

The Veterans Memorial Bridge is located at the site of the historic Essex Bridge. Originally, a ferry crossed the Danvers River at the location from 1636 until 1788 when the first bridge was built. This bridge was rebuilt several times until 1896 when a steel

pony truss A truss bridge is a bridge whose load-bearing superstructure is composed of a truss, a structure of connected elements, usually forming triangular units. The connected elements, typically straight, may be stressed from tension, compression, or ...

swing bridge with trestle approaches was constructed by the county. It was constructed by the

King Bridge Company The King Iron Bridge & Manufacturing Company was a late-19th-century bridge building company located in Cleveland, Ohio. It was founded by Zenas King (1818–1892) in 1858 and subsequently managed by his sons, James A. King and Harry W. King an ...

Cleveland Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–U.S. maritime border and approximately west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania st ...

Ohio Ohio ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Lake Erie to the north, Pennsylvania to the east, West Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Indiana to the ...

. Part of the cost of the 1896 bridge was covered by the Bay State Street Railway, which operated on a track over the bridge until 1934. The trolley tracks were later removed. By the early 1990s the steel bridge had deteriorated to a point where it had to be demolished. It was replaced by the current span in 1996, and "dedicated on August 2nd, 1996 in honor Salem veterans who served the United States in its time of need". The Veterans Memorial Bridge contains seven main spans with the longest measuring 220 feet. It also contains four approach spans ranging between 60 and 160 feet in length. The current bridge is typical of

MassDOT The Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) oversees roads, public transit, aeronautics, and transportation licensing and registration in the US state of Massachusetts. It was created on November 1, 2009, by the 186th Sessio ...

's preference for use of

weathering steel Weathering steel, often referred to by the genericised trademark COR-TEN steel and sometimes written without the hyphen as corten steel, is a group of steel alloys that form a stable external layer of rust that eliminates the need for painting ...

for steel bridges.MassDOT Bridge Data Sheets
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References

{{Reflist Bridges completed in 1896 Bridges completed in 1997 Monuments and memorials in Massachusetts Beam bridges in the United States Road bridges in Massachusetts Steel bridges in the United States Bridges in Essex County, Massachusetts