# @downinnadesert on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DdpAt7MGwt4
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/70864478-downinnadesert-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/69811fad2c.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-09-23T19:00:04.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Down In The Desert🌵 (@downinnadesert) — https://gondola.cc/downinnadesert

## Caption

In 1915 Arizona floated a bridge down the Colorado River and swung it into place.

Before that, if you wanted to cross the lower Colorado at Yuma, you took a ferry. That was it. People had been running boats across there for decades, and by the 1910s, with cars getting popular and Good Roads associations pushing for a highway that ran ocean to ocean, a ferry was not going to cut it.

Yuma residents had been demanding a bridge since the early 1900s. In 1913 their congressman, Carl Hayden, took it to Washington and got the money.

Here is the interesting part. The federal funding came through the Office of Indian Affairs, and the justification Congress approved it on was that the bridge would connect Yuma to the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation on the opposite bank. That was the stated reason. The thing everybody actually wanted was a transcontinental highway.

Construction started in the fall of 1914. Omaha Structural Steel Works built a 336 foot steel truss span, and on March 3, 1915, they floated it down the river and swung it into position. The city historian in Yuma says school was reportedly cancelled that day so kids could come watch it happen.

The Yuma Commercial Club threw a grand opening that May.

It was the first highway crossing of the lower Colorado River. For a long stretch of river, it was the only one. It is the oldest through truss bridge in Arizona and the only Pennsylvania truss in the state. It cost $73,800.

It carried the Ocean to Ocean Highway, then US 80, until a newer bridge opened to the west in 1956. It closed in 1988 and sat unused for more than a decade before a rebuild put it back in service in the early 2000s.

It is still there and you can still drive it. Three hours from Phoenix, right by the old territorial prison.

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#Yuma #ColoradoRiver #ArizonaHistory #ArizonaNews #DownInnaDesert

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## Credits

No public credits are recorded here. This does not identify who made the post.

## Tags

coloradoriver, downinnadesert, arizonahistory, yuma, arizonanews

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