McCall’s Ferry Bridge: A Tale of Engineering and Folklore

On the evening of March 3, 1818, one of the most remarkable bridges ever built across the Susquehanna River was torn from its place and carried downstream by ice. It stood at McCall’s Ferry, a short distance upriver from where Holtwood dam sits today, where the river squeezed between high, rocky banks along the Lancaster and York County line. Completed only three years earlier, Theodore Burr’s covered bridge had already earned a reputation as an engineering wonder. Some described it as one of the finest pieces of architecture in America. Others, looking at the dangerous gorge below it, may have wondered how long any bridge could survive there.

They did not have to wonder long.

By the time the great ice flood of 1818 finished its work, Burr’s bridge was gone. One of its massive arches lodged eight miles away near Peach Bottom. Another was carried farther downriver, passing beneath the Rock Run bridge before coming to rest on the flats below Havre de Grace, some 20 miles away. Nothing was ever built to replace it. Today, the old bridge site lies beneath the backwaters of Holtwood Dam. The river has covered the crossing and whatever traces remained of a bridge once remembered with awe by engineers, travelers, and local storytellers. But for a brief moment in the early 1800s, McCall’s Ferry was home to one of the boldest wooden bridges in America.

And according to local legend, it was also home to profanity, prophecy, and a curse from Thaddeus Stevens.

Long before the bridge, McCall’s Ferry was an important Susquehanna crossing. It connected Martic Township in Lancaster County with Lower Chanceford Township in York County. In an age before modern bridges, ferries were lifelines. They carried people, horses, wagons, goods, mail, and news from one side of the river to the other. But McCall’s Ferry was not an ordinary stretch of river. Here, the Susquehanna narrowed dramatically as it passed through a deep rock gorge. The channel was swift and powerful. The banks rose steeply on both sides. The riverbed dropped so deep that even experienced surveyors struggled to measure it.

In 1801, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the famed engineer and architect later known for his work on the United States Capitol, surveyed the lower Susquehanna. At McCall’s Ferry, he tried to find the river bottom with a line 180 feet long and failed. He also warned that, despite the location often being discussed as a promising place for a bridge, it would never be possible to build a safe one there. The reason was simple. The same narrow gorge that made McCall’s Ferry attractive as a crossing also made it dangerous. Floodwater and ice were funneled into a confined space. When the Susquehanna rose, it rose fast. When ice broke loose upstream, it could pile into the gorge with terrifying force.

Latrobe’s warning would be unfortunately ignored.

The man who accepted the challenge was Theodore Burr, one of the most important bridge builders of his day. Burr was born in Connecticut in the 1760s and was a cousin of Vice President Aaron Burr, the controversial political figure best remembered today for killing Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel. Theodore’s own fame came not from politics or scandal, but from timber, stone, water, and daring engineering. He became known for his wooden arch bridges, and his name lives on in the Burr arch truss, a design that combined an arch with a truss framework to create strong wooden spans. In the early 1800s, his bridges crossed major rivers throughout Pennsylvania and beyond, including the Susquehanna at Columbia and Harrisburg. Around 1809, Pennsylvania authorized bridge companies to construct crossings at McCall’s Ferry, Columbia, Harrisburg, and Northumberland. The McCall’s Ferry Bridge Company was incorporated in 1811, and the state contributed $20,000 toward the work.

The site was brutal. But if anyone could bridge it, Theodore Burr believed he could. His plan called for a covered wooden bridge of two unequal spans. Because the deepest channel ran closer to the Lancaster County side, the single stone pier was built nearer the York County shore. The longer span stretched from the Lancaster abutment to the pier, reaching more than 360 feet. It was one of the longest, and possibly the longest, wooden covered spans known at the time. The bridge was roughly 570 feet long in total and wide enough for two lanes of traffic. This was no small country crossing. It was a major transportation link, intended to carry wagons, carriages, livestock, and travelers across one of the most difficult parts of the lower Susquehanna.

Building it was another matter.

Burr began work during the winter of 1814–1815. His own surviving description of the project reads like a battle report. To construct the great arch, Burr used floats or rafts along the Lancaster County shore. On these floats, his men built timber frames that followed the curve of the arch. The pieces had to be raised, braced, steadied, and eventually moved into position over the river. Just as the crew prepared to move the arch into place, anchor ice, the heavy underwater ice that forms on the riverbed and breaks loose into the current, began to run. Soon it jammed in the gorge. The floats were pressed, tilted, and damaged. The arch, still standing on temporary supports, leaned dangerously toward the shore.

Burr refused to give up. He and his workers used capstans, ropes, runners, rollers, sleds, and the frozen surface of the river itself to move sections of the arch into place. Men worked in rain, snow, floodwater, and half-frozen mush ice. Some were reportedly in water up to their arms repeatedly throughout the day. As many as 120 volunteers came from both sides of the river to help. The work was dangerous, exhausting, and astonishing.

By the end of January 1815, the great arch was finally united in the center. The temporary scaffolding was cut away. Fires lit the scene. The immense wooden curve rose out from the Lancaster shore and stretched westward into the dark. Burr later described it as the grandest spectacle he had ever seen. The bridge was not finished that night, but its greatest obstacle had been overcome. The shorter span was put into place, the decking was laid, and the bridge was enclosed with siding and a roof. Soon, travelers could cross from McCall’s Ferry in Lancaster County to McCall’s Ferry in York County in about half a mile.

When the bridge opened, it quickly became an important route. The August 1936 issue of Lancaster-York History & Legend, published by V.O. Reichard, claimed that in 1817, more carriages and wagons crossed the Susquehanna at McCall’s Ferry than at Columbia. While that claim is difficult to prove, it underscores McCall’s importance. Street Road on the Lancaster side was an important route toward Philadelphia, and the crossing at McCall’s Ferry helped connect the lower Susquehanna region with broader lines of travel between Pennsylvania, Maryland, and beyond. One early county history even described it as part of a winter line of communication between Philadelphia and Washington.

The bridge appears to have opened to traffic near the end of 1815. The December 22, 1815, edition of the Lancaster Intelligencer reported that, as of December 20, the McCall’s Ferry Bridge was passable for wagons. A formal dedication may have followed, though the exact date remains uncertain. The August 1936 issue of Lancaster-York History & Legend claimed that hundreds eventually gathered at the river to celebrate the new bridge. Some reportedly came the evening before and spent the night fishing. Others arrived early and spread elaborate meals on the bridge itself. At the center of it all was Theodore Burr, moving through the crowd on horseback, wearing a high silk hat.

It is a wonderful image: the master bridge builder riding across his own creation, the Susquehanna rolling beneath him, the impossible made briefly real.

But local legend remembered more than Burr’s engineering. According to Lancaster-York History & Legend, Burr was known along the river not only for his bridges, but also for his profanity. As the story was handed down, he cursed freely while working, keeping one eye on the river, one eye on the watching crowd, and both hands busy with the enormous task before him. The article claims some local people disapproved. They believed a bridge built amid so much swearing could never last. One saying attributed to them was that the Lord would never let it stand because the man swore too much.

It is easy to see why the story endured. Theodore Burr was fighting the Susquehanna in winter. His floats were being crushed by ice. His men were soaked, freezing, and exhausted. The great arch leaned in danger of collapse. Tools, timber, ropes, and capstans had to be coordinated in miserable conditions. If a bridge builder ever had cause to shout at the river, at the weather, at the ice, or at the men around him, McCall’s Ferry would have been the place. Whether the language was truly as colorful as legend claimed, the story fits the setting.

The strangest legend attached to the bridge involves a young Thaddeus Stevens. Long before he became the fierce congressman known as the “Old Commoner,” Stevens lived and worked in south-central Pennsylvania. According to the 1936 account, he crossed Burr’s bridge after securing his Maryland papers admitting him to the bar. As the story goes, Stevens arrived at the York County entrance and noticed broken boards in the bridge floor. Worried that his horse might step through, he dismounted and decided to walk the animal across.

He had not gone far when his own foot found one of the openings. Down he went.

The fall supposedly dropped him into the river. Fortunately, the water was low, and Stevens escaped with nothing worse than a soaking. But the young lawyer was furious. Once he reached the Lancaster County side, legend says he swore he would never set foot on the bridge again. Then he called on heaven to remove it for the good of all people. Two years later, the bridge was gone. For years afterward, according to local tradition, some blamed Stevens for the destruction. The actual destroyer was the Susquehanna.

In early March 1818, ice began to break and move. Heavy water rose behind it. The river climbed with astonishing speed. The March 7, 1818, edition of the Lancaster Intelligencer reported that the Susquehanna had been higher that week than it had been in the previous 40 years. In the narrow gorge at McCall’s Ferry, floodwater and ice were forced into a confined channel between high, rocky banks. The bridge held longer than one might expect. A March 16, 1818, account in the Lancaster Intelligencer reported that the structure did not move until ice began shooting over the top of the roof. Only then was the bridge lifted from its abutment and pier and carried away by the current. That detail is remarkable. It suggests that Burr’s bridge did not simply fail under ordinary pressure. It was overwhelmed by an extraordinary event at one of the most violent places on the river.

The bridge had been bold. The site was bolder. Latrobe had warned that McCall’s Ferry could not safely be bridged. Burr proved, for three years, that it could be done. The Susquehanna proved, in a single night, that it could also be undone.

No replacement bridge rose at McCall’s Ferry. The crossing disappeared back into ferry landings, river roads, and memory. In the twentieth century, Holtwood Dam changed the river again, submerging the old site beneath its backwaters. Not until August 21, 1968, after two years of construction, did another bridge finally cross the Susquehanna in this rugged lower river region. The Norman Wood Bridge, built about two miles downriver from the old McCall’s Ferry crossing and more than 100 feet above the Susquehanna, opened new and faster routes between Lancaster County, York County, Baltimore, and points south.

But Burr’s bridge had never entirely disappeared. Its story survived in engineering journals, old newspaper accounts, and river folklore. For three brief years, Theodore Burr’s bridge joined Lancaster and York counties at McCall’s Ferry. Then the Susquehanna took it back.

Shown above is the approximate location of the McCall’s Ferry Bridge.

Continue your adventure when you click the link to read about Jay Mackley and his fellow Susquehanna Ramblers 2022 search for any remaining signs of the bridge during a Conowingo Dam reservoir drawdown.

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Resources

• Lancaster Intelligencer Sat, Mar 18, 1815
• Lancaster Intelligencer Fri, Dec 22, 1815
• Lancaster Intelligencer Mon, Mar 16, 1818
• “Lancaster – York History & Legend” August 1936
• McCall’s Ferry, Lancaster County
• Burr’s 1815 McCall’s Ferry bridge was no match for Susquehanna ice
• “Some Early County Bridges” by S. M. Sener, 1907 Journal of Lancaster Historical Society, v. 11, no. 4
• Wooden Covered Spans Volume 40, Number 1, Winter 2017