Just west of New Concord, Ohio, the Fox Creek S Bridge stands as one of the National Road’s most distinctive early crossings.
Built in 1828 where the National Road crossed Fox Creek, the masonry structure measures about 140 feet long and 26 feet wide, with a single 30-foot stone arch spanning the stream below. Its unusual S-shaped alignment was not merely decorative. The curved roadway eased the bridge’s approaches, reduced the span needed across the creek, softened the grade, and helped protect the surrounding fill from erosion. Constructed of cut stone with a brick roadway, it reflected the practical engineering that defined the National Road as America’s first great federally funded overland route.
The bridge remained part of that travel corridor well into the automobile era. During World War I, when the National Road from Cumberland, Maryland, to Vandalia, Illinois, was paved in brick for military traffic, the Fox Creek S Bridge became the last section to receive that treatment in 1919. Its survival was not guaranteed. By 1936, plans could easily have swept it aside in favor of a replacement, but the Ohio Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution successfully urged the state to reroute traffic around the old bridge instead. Because of that effort, the Fox Creek S Bridge endured as a rare surviving reminder of the National Road’s early landscape.
