In his monthly series “Bridging Time”, fellow pontist Calvin Sneed travels to parts of the central and eastern US to profile some of the fanciest historic bridges in the region. The BHC is profiling one of his bridges from the series. It’s one of the later forms of the Rainbow Arch Bridge patented by James B. Marsh, but this one is a bit unique for its aesthetic appearance and its history. Here’s the story about the McBee Bridge in Tennessee:
East Tennessee is home to four open-spandrel concrete deck arch bridges. The Hammond Bridge in Kingsport, the Henley Street Bridge in Knoxville, the Time-Line Bridge at Westel, Tennessee and the Wolf Creek Bridge east of Newport… spectacular, sweeping deck arches underneath the highway surface.
But take those same bridges and turn them upside down! The bridge type then becomes a concrete “through” arch bridge in the shape of a rainbow. Coincidentally, the Holston River is also home to the only concrete through arch bridge in the state of Tennessee. It’s the McBee Bridge on the Knox-Jefferson County line at Strawberry Plains.
The Holston River flowing down from Kingsport has always had various ferries along its 142 miles, according to Bill Carey, founder of TN History for Kids. Along the route downriver in the 19th and early 20th centuries, he noted a Hawkins County ferry busy operating at Christian’s Bend in the river, along with Melinda’s Ferry southwest of Rogersville, also in Hawkins County. Further down, Long’s Ferry in Grainger-Hamblen County, Noe’s Ferry in Grainger-Hamblen County, Smith’s Ferry and Nance’s Ferry, both crossing the Holston River between Grainger and Jefferson Counties were among the many landings where ferries were located, some of them with no name historically recorded.
According to a historical marker on the Andrew Johnson Highway U.S. 11-E, many early travelers from North Carolina, reported using the McBee Ferry that crossed the shallow Holston River at the current Southern Railroad bridge in a bend of the river at Strawberry Plains. It took a couple of visits from his native Virginia, but William McBee quickly saw the need for a ferry of some sort to replace the rocky ford in the river, so he established one in 1792, about 2,500 feet downriver from the railroad bridge. It quickly became one of the busiest ferry crossings on the Holston-French Broad watershed because it was near the junction of the two rivers. It’s been written that more travelers crossed the river at McBee Ferry because it automatically put travelers on the north side of the river for downtown Knoxville, rather than having them wait in line for the crowded ferries and bridges downtown. A toll bridge replaced the McBee Ferry in the early 1830’s, but was destroyed in a flood and the ferry resumed into the 20th century.
In 1929, the proposed McBee Bridge was one of two bridges approved by Knox County to replace a couple of river ferries. A planned “deck” arch bridge at the McBee Ferry (similar to the Henley Street Bridge at Knoxville and the Hammond Bridge at Kingsport) was abandoned because the deck arches underneath the road surface would not have been tall enough to clear the Southern Railroad tracks that also ran along the riverbank. As a result, designer Freeland-Roberts (an engineering firm that still exists), designed a concrete “through” arch bridge for McBee flipping the arches high above the road surface, hence an “upside down Henley-Hammond Bridge.”
At 785 feet carrying Mascot Road over the Holston River, the McBee Bridge is still one of the largest rainbow arch bridges in the United States. It was built by the Southern Bridge Company of Birmingham, Alabama and was completed in 1930. It has three, open-spandrel concrete tied rainbow arches with enormous ribs, sometimes referred to as bowstring arches, along with five concrete tee-beam approach spans on the north side of the river. The middle river channel span is 222.5 feet, and the two spans on either side of the channel span are 165 feet long each. The original bridge contained two traffic lanes and a sidewalk; the sidewalk was removed in 1979 to allow the width of the lanes to be widened, accommodating heavy trucks from nearby rock quarries.
At the site of the former McBee Ferry about 18-hundred feet north of the bridge is the new McBee Ferry Landing river access park that celebrates the history of one of the busiest ferries in East Tennessee. The remains of the approach ramps into the river still exist after more than 175 years, now providing access to canoeing, fishing, kayaking, birdwatching and taking a leisurely float underneath a lazy, but massive concrete Holston River rainbow bridge, about 21 miles upriver from downtown Knoxville.
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