page_title: U.S. Route 15 in Maryland
section_title: Point of Rocks Bridge
hierarchical_section_title: U.S. Route 15 in Maryland / History / Point of Rocks Bridge
caption_attribution_description: English: U.S. Route 15 bridge across the Potomac River at Point of Rocks, Maryland.
context_page_description: U.S. Route 15 is a part of the U.S. Highway System that runs from Walterboro, South Carolina to Painted Post, New York. In Maryland, the highway runs 37.85 miles from the Virginia state line at the Potomac River in Point of Rocks north to the Pennsylvania state line near Emmitsburg. Known for most of its length as Catoctin Mountain Highway, US 15 is the primary north–south highway of Frederick County. The highway connects the county seat of Frederick with Point of Rocks, Leesburg, Virginia, and Charles Town, West Virginia, to the south and with Thurmont, Emmitsburg, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to the north. US 15 is a four-lane divided highway throughout the state except for the portion between the Point of Rocks Bridge and the highway's junction with US 340 near Jefferson. The U.S. Highway is a freeway along its concurrency with US 340 and through Frederick, where the highway meets US 40 and Interstate 70. US 15 has an unsigned business route through Emmitsburg.
  US 15 is the descendant of a pair of turnpikes that connected Frederick with Emmitsburg to the north and Buckeystown to the south.
context_section_description: Several ferries crossed the Potomac River at Point of Rocks before the first bridge was constructed there in 1852.  This wooden bridge was constructed to carry a double-track narrow gauge railroad from a junction with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to a blast furnace to process the area's iron ore.  This bridge, which also carried wagons and horses, was destroyed on June 9, 1861 by Confederate forces under General Turner Ashby, the same day the bridge at Brunswick was destroyed.  The second bridge at Point of Rocks was an iron bridge constructed in 1889.  US 15 originally followed Commerce Street and Canal Road, which is now used to access the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park, through an at-grade crossing of the B&O Railroad to the Maryland end of the bridge, which crossed the river immediately to the east of the modern bridge.  The 1889 iron bridge was swept away in the March 1936 flood that also destroyed the Potomac River crossings at Harpers Ferry, Shepherdstown, and Hancock.
  In November 1936, MDSRC put together a plan to replace the Potomac River bridges at Hancock, Shepherdstown, and Point of Rocks.  The Point of Rocks Bridge became the first of the three crossings to be started when construction began March 25, 1937; the bridge's concrete piers were completed and the piers of the old bridge were removed from the river by September of that year.  The new bridge and its approaches, which crossed over the B&O Railroad on the Maryland side, opened December 26, 1937.  The camelback truss bridge spans 1,689 feet (515 m) and has a 24-foot-wide (7.3 m) roadway and a pair of 3-foot-wide (0.91 m) sidewalks.  US 15 followed a temporary approach to the new bridge along Commerce Street that remained vulnerable to major floods.  The U.S. Highway was moved to higher ground on Clay Street when the highway was reconstructed and widened from Point of Rocks to Tuscarora in 1949.
caption: Riverside view from the Maryland side of the Point of Rocks Bridge, which carries US 15 across the Potomac River at Point of Rocks
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