Shared by Trish Geasland Bevans: “A local guy found this and thought you might find it interesting.” Indeed, I did.l Trish said she believes this once marked the old bridge off of Hwy. 276 in Sabine County, by Holly Park, where there is an old sunken bridge. The bridge was built in 1920 by Austin Bros. Bridge Co.
According to Texas Historical Commission, Frank and George Austin, originally salesmen for an Iowa-based bridge company, revolutionized Texas’s infrastructure development when, in 1910, they established the state’s only steel plant dedicated to metal truss bridges. At the time, all trusses first had to be fabricated in East Coast or Midwest foundries and then shipped by rail to Texas, a process that could take weeks or months.
The brothers’ Dallas plant, which produced more than a million pounds of steel by 1915, could deliver the same product in less than a week. The Austin Brothers also produced a mail order catalogue of standard bridges and a magazine called The Highways, which they mailed to Texas’ county commissioners every month. This aggressive marketing campaign worked, and by the 1930s, the company had expanded into concrete and suspension bridges. Marketing themselves as “the right bridges for the right places,” the Austin Brothers Bridge Company secured more than 3,000 bridge contracts by 1945; more than 200 of their bridges still stand in Texas.
If anyone has any additional information on the bridge, please feel free to share it here!