Sebastian County Road 4G Bridge

The Sebastian County Road 4G Bridge, located on what is now West Harmony Road where it crosses a tributary of Sugar Loaf Creek near West Hartford (Sebastian County), is an open masonry substructure bridge constructed in 1940 through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a Depression-era public relief agency.

Sebastian County leaders in 1939 decided to undertake an ambitious and widespread effort to improve rural roads throughout the county with assistance from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies. They applied for funding from the WPA and on December 11, 1939, that organization approved $1,226,362 for a county-wide project to “improve roads, including clearing; grubbing; excavating and grading; constructing curbs, gutters and bridges; draining; laying pipe; surfacing; and performing incidental and appurtenant work.”

The Sebastian County Road 4G Bridge was built as part of the WPA project. The bridge features a single stone pier linking a pair of twenty-two-foot-wide spans supporting a reinforced-concrete deck; the abutments are also of stone masonry construction. The forty-four-foot-long bridge includes a twenty-one-foot-wide roadbed with an eighteen-foot travel surface. An unadorned reinforced-concrete balustrade is included on both sides of the deck.

The Coop Creek Bridge near Mansfield (Sebastian and Scott counties) was also constructed as part of the same WPA project.

The Sebastian County Road 4G Bridge continues to serve the people of its rural area in the twenty-first century. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 5, 1995.

For additional information:
Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department, Arkansas Historic Bridge Inventory Review and Evaluation, Vol. II, 1996.

Story, Ken. “Sebastian County Road 4G Bridge.” National Register of Historic Places registration form. On file at Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, Little Rock, Arkansas. Online at http://www.arkansaspreservation.com/National-Register-Listings/PDF/SB0455.nr.pdf (accessed December 21, 2020).

WPA Central Office Files, 1939–1942, Ala.–Arkansas. Arkansas State Archives, Little Rock, Arkansas.

Mark K. Christ
Central Arkansas Library System