“Bridging Time” — a monthly series featuring photos by Calvin Sneed — highlights steel truss and concrete arch bridges throughout the United States. During his travels, Calvin has taken thousands of photos of more than 1,150 bridges (mostly in the Southeast). He can be reached at douglassriverview@gmail.com. This month’s featured bridge is the McBee Bridge at Strawberry Plains.
We all know the Hammond Bridge on Fort Henry Drive, crossing the Holston River South Fork, with its spectacular, sweeping arches underneath the highway deck on the bridge that many of us perilously learned how to drive on to get our licenses.
Hammond is a concrete “deck” arch bridge because the arches are below the highway deck. East Tennessee is home to four of them. But take that same bridge and turn it upside down! It 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 Tennessee 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.
Farther 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 1830s, 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 1,800 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.
Stay Engaged
React to this article and join our community of readers sharing their feedback.
