Austin Bridge Company Sites

Galveston Causeway "carries traffic over Galveston Bay and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. The original causeway was built in 1912 and carried both rail and auto traffic. The auto traffic was transferred to new causeways built to the west" during the late 1930s, "leaving the original bridge for rail traffic." The Depression-era structure was constructed as a Public Works Administration (P.W.A.) project from 1936 to 1938. The auto bridges have since been replaced and demolished. PWA Project No. Tex. 1968-R

The Texas state highway 34 bridge at the Trinity River over the Ellis and Kaufman county line was completed in 1934, and is no longer extant. The bridge, funded largely through the National Recovery Act, was "a single 150-foot Parker through truss and 53 steel I-Beam approach spans" (Lauderdale, 1996). The Trinity River Bridge was one of 543 Texas emergency projects funded under NIRA. The bridge was necessary as the Texas Highway Department planned to re-route SH 34 on a new location, and it included new roadway grading and drainage structures, as well as the bridge. Special provisions under NIRA...

The construction of the Colorado River bridge was part of a larger THD undertaking to reroute SH 29 around Buchanan Dam, which was under construction beginning in 1931. The original roadway and the bridge across the Colorado at Bluffton were inundated by Lake Buchanan after completion of the dam in 1937. The bridge site was fixed 1 mile below the Buchanan Dam, at a location where a granite outcropping formed a ledge at the east bank of the river. This ledge was considered an ideal location for the eastern approach to the bridge. In a preliminary inspection report dated July 17,...