Building a temporary replacement structure near Fort Mill, SC. From: Southern Railway, 1917.
More than several dozen bridges were taken out by the rushing waters of the flood of 1916. These bridges, suspended over the Catawba River, were washed away by the rising waters and resulted in several of the deaths and several of the hundreds of thousand dollars in damage that the flood resulted in. The Belmont Bridge trapped 18. The Seaboard Air Line steel bridge at Mount Holly, the Interurban steel bridge, and the county highway steel bridge were all brand new and were estimated to have been worth over $125,000 at that time. Perhaps one of the most memorable bridge collapses though was the Southern Railway’s bridge that was only 11 miles from Charlotte and largely affected the transportation and communication in and out of the city after the flood.
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