page_title: Callicoon Bridge
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Callicoon Bridge / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Former Callicoon Bridge over the Delaware River during heavy winter ice in 1904
context_page_description: The Callicoon Bridge carries vehicles and pedestrians across the Delaware River between the unincorporated hamlet of Callicoon in the town of Delaware, part of Sullivan County, New York, and Damascus Township in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, both in the United States. It is a multi-girder structure of steel and concrete built in the early 1960s to replace an older bridge built in 1899.
  In addition to the river, it crosses the flood plain on its eastern bank in New York created by the confluence of the Delaware and Callicoon Creek, one of its major tributaries in the area, just downstream. As a result, the total length of the bridge's seven spans is almost a thousand feet. It is the longest bridge on the Upper Delaware.
context_section_description: First settled by Europeans in the 1750s, Callicoon first grew as a lumbering community a decade later. At that time the loggers strapped their product to wooden rafts and floated them downriver all the way to the markets of Philadelphia. The journey usually took a week: one particularly daring rafter, Elias Mitchell, made the trip in a mere two days by traveling nonstop. Later, mills were established at Phillipsburg, New Jersey and Easton, Pennsylvania, requiring a shorter trip.
  In the mid-19th century, the river was supplemented as Callicoon's connection to the wider world by the New York and Erie Railroad's Delaware Division, which established a station in the small settlement, where trains stopped on their way between the Great Lakes and New York City. It grew in population, and by 1875 the local lumber industry reached its peak, with over 3,000 rafts leaving the village for markets and mills downriver. Other forest-product industries followed. Tanneries set up shop, drawn by the abundant Eastern Hemlock in the woods on both sides of the river, and a paper mill flourished until it burned down in 1879.
  The residents soon grew frustrated with having to travel downriver to Cochecton to cross. In 1886 a group of citizens met to organize a bridge-building company. Shares in the newly established Callicoon Bridge Company were priced at $25 ($1000 in modern dollars) and were purchased eagerly. While sentiment was heavily in favor of erecting one, enthusiasm dimmed as it was realized what that would entail—buying land for the approaches on both sides, getting both New York and Pennsylvania to approve the project, selecting a design and hiring a contractor to build the bridge. Getting all those things done took another decade; the process was expedited when the owner of the land on the Pennsylvania side donated it to the company.
  In the late 1890s the Horseheads Bridge Company, which later built Dingman's Ferry Bridge downriver, was hired to build a truss bridge. It cost $23,180 and opened early in 1899. After being open for free on its first day, it became a toll bridge to recoup the construction costs. No major maintenance was necessary save raising it slightly after a heavy storm in 1904.
  In 1923 the company sold the bridge to the states of New York and Pennsylvania for $35,000, who placed it under their joint commission's control. It became a free bridge thereafter, and the company dissolved. No serious maintenance issues presented themselves, not even after the heavy floods that followed Hurricane Diane in 1955.
  The bridge was replaced with the current structure shortly thereafter, because it was getting old. More and heavier vehicles were crossing it regularly; the commission decided it was cheaper in the long run to build a new bridge than upgrade the old one. It remained open while the current structure was constructed, slightly downstream, by the Binghamton Bridge and Foundation Company starting in 1961. The new bridge opened with a formal dedication on August 1, 1962. The old bridge was dismantled.
caption: Original Callicoon Bridge during 1904 storm
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