Military History | Burnside Bridge — A New Bridge for an Old Road

In August and September 1964, masons repointed the three-arched limestone bridge over Antietam Creek and stripped off its concrete coping, replacing it with boards that, in the superintendent's report, simulated "the original, 19th Century parapet covering." That was the easy part. The bridge still carried a public county road.

Washington County had built it in 1836 to join Sharpsburg with Rohrersville, one of a series of crossings commissioned during a long campaign of road improvement. The park's marker credits John Weaver as its designer and builder at a cost of $2,300; the park's own website gives $3,200. It was the Rohrbach or Lower Bridge until 17 September 1862, when the Ninth Corps spent much of a morning trying to force the crossing against Confederate infantry holding the western bluff, and afterwards took the name of the general who commanded the troops sent against it.

Closing it to cars meant giving the county something else to cross. Project R-27 built a mile and a quarter of new road and, as Superintendent Harold Lessem described it, "a handsome new bridge over Antietam Creek" to be transferred to Washington County in exchange for a section of the old Burnside Bridge Road. The pavement on the approaches would then be obliterated and the road below the structure "restored to its approximate appearance in September 1862." Traffic stopped in 1966. Four monuments mounted on the bridge came off at the same time, the park's wayside records, and were re-erected on the east bank.

The structure has since been taken apart once more. A section of wall fell into the creek in January 2014; between October 2015 and December 2016 the walls were dismantled and reset stone by mapped stone, and the wood coping replaced again. Cars cross upstream now, and the bridge carries walkers.

📸 Cover: Burnside Bridge over Antietam Creek, 21 June 2018, by Farragutful (CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons). Second image: the bridge in September 2024, after the 2015-16 rebuild, by Upstateherd (CC BY-SA 4.0).