Travelers following the National Road through eastern Ohio should make time for a stop at the Y Bridge in downtown Zanesville. Few crossings in the country are as distinctive, and fewer still are tied so closely to the early movement of people, goods, and roads across the interior. At the meeting of the Licking and Muskingum rivers, the bridge remains both a landmark and a working part of U.S. Route 40, offering a direct connection to one of the most unusual pieces of transportation history along the old road.
The site had long been important to overland travel. Zane’s Trace passed through here by 1798, and when the National Road reached Zanesville in 1826, it also used this crossing. Before the Muskingum was regulated by dams and locks, floods repeatedly damaged bridges at the mouth of the Licking, making any crossing here difficult to maintain. The first Y-shaped bridge was built in 1813 by Rufus Scott to replace a ferry, but it proved fragile and collapsed just five years later. A second wooden bridge followed in 1819, only to be condemned after heavy use and flood damage left it unsafe.
A third bridge, a covered Buckingham through-truss, was completed in 1832 and served the city for decades. It was financed by local stockholders and operated as a toll bridge, with the National Road branch later purchased through a combination of state, city, and county funds so tolls could be removed. By 1900, however, the aging structure had been judged unsound, and officials began planning a replacement. The result was the celebrated 1902 Y Bridge, a pioneering concrete-and-steel structure that was, at the time, the only bridge of its kind in the United States and among the earliest American bridges to use that method of construction.
That 1902 bridge became the best-known version of the Y Bridge and carried traffic for nearly eight decades. It survived the great flood of March 1913 even after railroad cars from an upstream bridge struck it and destroyed its parapets, while every other Muskingum River bridge in Zanesville collapsed. Over time, though, inspections found increasing deterioration, especially on the Linden Avenue leg, and by 1980, engineers concluded that the superstructure needed to be replaced. After debate over whether to reproduce the historic form or build a faster, less expensive replacement, the old bridge was closed in 1983 and demolished. A new steel-girder Y Bridge, designed to echo some of the earlier bridge appearances while reusing historic piers, opened later that year and continues to carry National Road traffic through the heart of Zanesville.
