Bridges and Dam

Of three similar late nineteenth-century pony truss bridges over Abbott Run—one to the south on Howard Road, another farther north at Arnold Mills—this has the additional interest of a small lattice-girder metal bridge over a mill raceway as a prelude. The granite-lined raceway, which once served a small mill for cotton cloth, now runs under the corner of a large shingled mid-twentieth-century house where the Rawson Mill once stood. The site is now landscaped to the mill pond. Its granite dam and the sylvan setting enhance the setting for the principal bridge over the run itself, which nearby suburbanization thus far threatens but does not spoil. This bridge and others like it over Abbott Run were completely unaltered until 1989 when safety upgrading compelled the addition of low aluminum guard rails inside the trusswork, thereby somewhat disrupting a little the lacy character of the original engineering.