There is another old steel bridge on an old routing of OK-21 / US-70 across the Little River north of Idabel on "Old Broken Bow Highway." It is sitting in place but was bypassed a couple of years ago and replaced by a modern concrete bridge. OK-21 / US-70 was rerouted to the current routing in the mid-1930's.
About 30 years ago, I was in Idabel for some reason (just driving around for the sake of it, most likely) and I decided to take what looked like the old highway north out of Idabel on the county map book that I had at the time. This alignment crossed the Little River, which made me suspicious that there might be an old bridge there. My hunch was correct, and there is an amazing crossing there. This was long before sites like the late, lamented bridgehunter.com and social media existed, and there wasn't much information about bridges at all online. We had to find bridges the old fashioned way: study maps for hours at a time, using your skills at spotting old bridges by using a county level map and going out in the field and looking for bridges. Sometimes you hit a home run, sometimes you got a base hit, and sometimes you struck out. The bridge hobby is completely different now than it was even 20 years ago. I lived in Kansas City in the early 2000s, and I drove around looking for bridges all the time, usually striking out. Ten years or so later, bridgehunter.com had thousands of bridge listings, including a ton of bridges in the KC metro that I had no idea were there. Many of them now no longer exist. With the demise of bridgehunter.com and the ephemerality of social media, it isn't as easy as it was a year ago, but it's still nothing like it was in the 1990s.
In the early 1960's US-259 was created from Nacogdoches TX to Page Oklahoma. In Oklahoma there was new road built through mountainous terrain from Smithville OK to Page OK. There was a bypass / straightening around Bethel OK. From south of DeKalb TX to the Red River Bridge US-259 was rerouted from TX-26 to both bypass DeKalb and directly connect with the newly built bridge. Most of the rest of this road was just a renumbering of state highways both in Texas and Oklahoma.
Le Flore County is in my old neck of the woods. What is now US 259 from US 59/270 near Page to Smithville was originally OK 103, from Smithville to Broken Bow was OK 21, from Broken Bow to Idabel was a follow route of US 70, from Idabel to just north of the Red River near Harris was OK 87, and the Red River bridge and approaches was new construction especially for US 259. I've never seen a map that showed a different number for the section south of OK 87. OK 21 was a weird C shaped highway that ended at the Arkansas border at both termini.
The original truss bridge on this (current) routing was used for bidirectional traffic until the 1990's and for northbound (IIRC) traffic for another decade more or less. It was eventually removed.
Yes. this was an incredible bridge. It had 9 Parker pony spans, a K-truss through span, and another pony span at the other end. I think what doomed it more than anything was geometry. It was lower in elevation than the SB bridge, and the way the NB lanes ran through the area were weird.
Another bridge in that area that has been largely forgotten is the old OK 21 (later OK 4) Mountain Fork River bridge. I remember riding across it in the 1980s, but it was removed not long after that. It was a multiple span through truss bridge of some design that I cannot recall.
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Topic: US-259 McCurtain County (South of Idabel) (Read 1888 times)