Last week’s announcement that Tallahatchie County has been awarded $4.4 million to construct a new bridge on Levee Road — a replacement for the historic Lamb-Fish Bridge — means that the old structure will retain its viability as a landmark.
The award of $4,441,973 was made through the Mississippi Transportation Commission’s Emergency Road and Bridge Repair Fund, a fund created by the state legislature’s Mississippi Infrastructure Modernization Act of 2018.
That fund authorized issuance of up to $250 million in bonds to repair public roads and bridges in the state. A total of 200 bridges, including 99 that, like Lamb-Fish, are currently closed, will be repaired or replaced.
Lamb-Fish Bridge, which spans the Tallahatchie River, has been closed to vehicular traffic for several months. Its superstructure and substructure had been rated poor for years and, overall, it was listed as structurally deficient. Its rating was further downgraded last year, prompting the closing.
“It’s outlived its usefulness as a roadway bridge,” Tallahatchie County Engineer Kelly Greenwood told the Board of Supervisors in 2015, as preliminary legwork proceeded on a proposal to construct a new bridge just downstream from Lamb-Fish. The plan, Greenwood said then, would be to retain the center concrete roadbed and center iron sections of the original bridge and to remove vehicular approach spans to the west and east. Limited pedestrian access would remain.
The latter is important, because Lamb-Fish is iconic. It was built in 1905 by the American Bridge Co. of New York after being commissioned by the Lamb-Fish Lumber Co., which operated a saw mill in Charleston.
The structure, Mississippi’s only documented example of the vertical lift-span design of bridge construction, allowed a spur of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad to be located in Charleston and Lamb-Fish interests in the city to expand and grow. With a steady new flow of virgin timber via rail car from the Delta, within a few years Lamb-Fish Lumber Co. boasted the largest hardwood saw mill plant in the world.
The milling operations later changed hands, but the Lamb-Fish Bridge continued to provide key rail transport. After an early 1930s fire destroyed what was left of the old Charleston mill, the bridge’s span was opened permanently for river traffic.
In the 1950s, the span was lowered, the railroad ties removed and the Lamb-Fish Bridge was converted to a one-lane car and truck bridge. In 1982, the bridge was posted to the National Register of Historic Places.
During intervening years, despite periodic improvements and maintenance, the 828.8-foot-long bridge, including spans, deteriorated to the point that for several decades local officials had sought a way to abandon it while preserving a key piece of local history.
The state award means that while a safe bridge for the future will be built, Lamb-Fish Bridge will retain a purpose as a proud and enduring monument to the past.
