In February of 2007 we moved to South Carolina and made a road trip out of the move. We blogged here during the trip and now we have made that drive one of our “Trippin” maps here on the site.

I didn’t write a post about our big river crossing at the time so I’m creating one now in 2017 so we can have a pin on the Mississippi River Crossings map. I am pre-dating the post in February of 2007 so that it sorts correctly on the blog.

Benjamin G. Humphreys Bridge

We chose to use the US Highway 82 between Shives, Arkansas and Greenville, Mississippi for our crossing of the big river that time. Unfortunately, we had a computer hard drive die and lost 3 months of pictures right after that trip, so we have none of our photos of the bridge, the other pictures we had posted on the blog here are all we have left from this fun trip.

I went on the internet looking for pictures of the bridge that we must have taken and found an interesting story. When we crossed they were in the midst of bridge drama that lasted almost 10 years.

A project to replace the Benjamin G. Humphreys bridge started in 2001. The new bridge was planned to be a giant cable stayed structure, one of the largest in North America. The new bridge was completed in 2006, but both Arkansas and Mississippi had difficulty funding the approach spans. As a result, the new bridge was completed, but with 100 foot drop-offs at each end, being the classic bridge to nowhere. Each state finally did fund their approach spans, with Mississippi being complete in 2008 and Arkansas being complete in 2009. However, the projects to tie the new approaches into the old highway were even later. The Mississippi side was completed in 2010, but the Arkansas side is still under construction as this was written in 2011. A temporary cross-over was built on the Arkansas side, allowing traffic to be shifted onto the new Greenville Bridge on August 4, 2010.- http://www.johnweeks.com/river_mississippi/pages/lmiss06.html

So we must have crossed on the old Benjamin G. Humphreys, which from the pictures, looks like many of the Mississippi bridges built in those days. The picture above must have been taken in about 2010 because they started tearing down the old bridge very soon after, even that story is dramatic. I have borrowed a pic from the story by John Weeks that I linked to above, it looks like he was there a few times during the 10 years it took for this project.

I could only find one photo of the new bridge with no approaches as it must have looked when we drove by, which I can’t for the life of me remember.

 

– We have pinned this post on our Mississippi River Crossings Map LINK
and
– We have pinned this post on our 2007 Road Trip Map LINK