Coop Creek Bridge

The Coop Creek Bridge, located on Sebastian County Road 236 where it crosses Coop Creek near Mansfield (Sebastian and Scott counties), 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 Coop Creek 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 Sebastian County Road 4G Bridge near West Hartford (Sebastian County) was also constructed as part of the same WPA project.

The Coop Creek Bridge continues to serve the people of Sebastian County 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. “Coop Creek Bridge.” National Register of Historic Places registration form. On file at Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, Little Rock, Arkansas. Online at https://www.arkansasheritage.com/docs/default-source/national-registry/sb0456-pdf.pdf?sfvrsn=bb339ff_0 (accessed June 24, 2021).

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

Mark K. Christ
Central Arkansas Library System