Geography of Marion County, Tennessee

Cumberland Avenue Bridge

The only concrete arch bridge ever built in Marion County, 1906

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Last updated: May 13, 2026

Cement-stucco housing along a Richard City street, indicative of the all-cement construction that included the Cumberland Avenue Bridge
Cement-stucco housing along Holly Avenue in Richard City. The all-cement construction approach used in the town's houses, utility poles, fences, and outbuildings ran through to the Cumberland Avenue Bridge, the engineering centerpiece of the same 1906 building campaign. Photo: Brian Stansberry, 2015 (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0).

The Cumberland Avenue Bridge over Poplar Springs Branch was a single-span reinforced concrete arch built in 1906 in the cement-built town of Richard City. It was designed by Lee Hunt Engineering of Iola, Kansas, the same firm that designed the Dixie Inn hotel for the new Dixie Portland Cement Company. Per Kelly Wilkerson's 2003 thesis, the Cumberland Avenue Bridge was the only concrete arch bridge ever constructed in Marion County. It was listed individually on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991, then removed from the Register in 2001 after a project widened the original 19-foot deck.

The 1906 design

Lee Hunt of Hunt Engineering and engineer Ellis Soper, who had directed construction of the Market Street Bridge in Chattanooga, were the on-site engineering pair for Dixie Portland's opening campaign at the Deptford site. Hunt Engineering, of Iola, Kansas, designed both the Cumberland Avenue Bridge and the Dixie Inn hotel on Cumberland Avenue near Townsite, working through the same 1906 and 1907 construction seasons in which the plant itself came online.

The original bridge was a single-span reinforced concrete arch, nineteen feet wide at the deck. Wilkerson 2003 notes that most of the company-town housing, the public buildings, and the cement utility poles and fencing of the surrounding streets were cast from the plant's own Portland cement product; the bridge was part of the same 1906 building campaign.

Place within Richard City's cement-construction system

The bridge sat inside the larger cement-construction system that Karen L. Daniels documented in her 1991 Multiple Property Documentation Form for the National Register. The MPDF treated the cement-stucco worker housing in its four major styles (Pyramid Cottage, Dixie Cottage, Four Square, Bungalow), the cement-stucco Dixie Inn hotel, the cement-stucco commissary and Dixie Hospital, the cement-stucco Richard City First Baptist Church, the obelisk-form cement utility poles, and the cement post-and-rail fencing as a single contributing context, with the Cumberland Avenue Bridge as a contributing individual structure. The bridge was the only single-span reinforced-concrete arch in the system; the houses, fences, and poles around it shared a cement-stucco and reinforced-concrete vocabulary at smaller scale.

National Register listing, 1991

On October 28, 1991, the Cumberland Avenue Bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places as an individual listing, separate from the two Richard City historic districts (the Putnam-Cumberland Historic District and the Townsite Historic District) that the Tennessee Historical Commission had listed three months earlier on July 25, 1991. The bridge's nomination was prepared by Karen L. Daniels for the Commission alongside her broader Multiple Property Documentation Form for the cement-construction system.

Widening and Register removal, 2001

At some point before 2001, the original 19-foot bridge was widened for modern two-way traffic (Wilkerson 2003, p. 169). The widening altered the bridge's documented historic features sufficiently that it no longer met the integrity standards required for the Register, and the Cumberland Avenue Bridge was formally removed from the National Register on July 13, 2001. Per Wilkerson, the arch span itself was retained in widened form rather than replaced.

Marion County lost its second former bridge listing fifteen years later when the Marion Memorial Bridge at Haletown, listed in 2007, was removed from the Register on June 28, 2016. Marion County now retains 18 active NRHP listings.

The bridge after 2001

As of Wilkerson's 2003 fieldwork, the widened bridge was still carrying Cumberland Avenue across Poplar Springs Branch with its arch span in place. Its current condition is best confirmed through Tennessee Department of Transportation bridge-inventory records.

Related

About Richard City →
About Dixie Portland Cement →
Transportation history of Marion County →
About Richard Hardy →

Sources