August 2025
Sullivan County in south-eastern New York State is known known for being a significant part of the Borscht Belt, the vacation land for New York City-area Jewish families prior to integration. The county also has a collection of historic iron bridges from an age when bridge construction was transitioning from wood framed construction to stronger materials.
Iron was the revolutionary, miracle material of the nineteenth century, an evolutionary technological change in bridge construction, but the few that survive today are seldom appreciated the way they should today.
Iron was abundant, cheap, and perfect for jobs requiring great strength in proportion to weight. Among the many uses for iron were for cylinders for pumps and steam engines; boats and barges for canals; beams and columns for mill buildings; and, eventually, bridges for roadways and railways. Several thousand iron bridges were built across America between 1840, when the use of iron began to replace wood and stone for bridge construction and 1880, when steel became the preferred material. Around six dozen survive today, mostly in the eastern states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, with a few in New England.
Regretfully, iron bridges have been almost universally disregarded and forgotten, even though they exemplify fundamental American values of craft, entrepreneurialism, and creativity. In America, engineering came to be dominated by entrepreneurs and craftsmen, largely self-taught at first, unlike in countries like Great Britain and France, where government financing, design and construction was the norm.
Two of the preserved historic iron bridges in Sullivan County are:
Horton Iron Bridge
Also known as Old Cooks Falls Bridge is a 190-foot-long, 14-foot-wide bridge, built in 1885 by King’s Bridge Company, spans the Beaver Kill River. It was closed to vehicular traffic around 1980, when a new bridge was built beside it.
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Denniston Hill Iron Bridge
The Denniston Hill Iron Bridge, built by the Groton Iron Works 1897, spans the Neversink in Fallsburg. It was closed to vehicular traffic in November 2010, when a new bridge was built beside it.
Sources: Horton Bridge (Old Cooks Falls Bridge) – HistoricBridges.org, inventionandtech.com/content/golden-age-iron-bridge-1, Friends of Beaverkill Community.
