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Dedicating the Cochrane Bridge: A Day of Triumph for Mobile’s Elite WITH THE OPENING OF THE COCHRANE BRIDGE and Causeway across Mobile Bay, 10½ miles long, one of the few remaining gaps in the Old Spanish Trail—the all year Atlantic to the Pacific highway will have been bridged. With the opening of this bridge, constructed at a cost of some two and a half million dollars, a continuous roadway is available from the East coast of Florida to Bay St. Louis, Miss.; and the completion of projects now under way in Mississippi and Louisiana, will afford a ferryless roadway between all the cities of the American Riviera, from Pensacola to New Orleans, and thence to the Pacific Coast.1 On June 14, 1927, the excitement of a throng from as many as ten states, who lined the new bridge and causeway from the city of Mobile to the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay, was momentarily checked by a sudden cloudburst—just as Dixie Graves, wife of Alabama’s Governor Bibb Graves, prepared to swing a ribbon-festooned bottle against the E M M A J . B R O U S S A R D Emma J. Broussard received her PhD in 18th-Century English Literature at Northern Illinois University, writing a dissertation on the biographer James Boswell. Since her retirement from university teaching in 2003 she has been engaged in private research; this article is part of a larger project on the Old Spanish Trail. For their courteous assistance in providing material for this article, she wants to thank the staffs of the University of South Alabama Archives, the Minnie Mitchell Archives at Oakleigh, the Mobile Public Library, the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Brother Robert Wood, Archivist at the Blume Library of St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, and Vincent Calametti of ALDOT. An earlier version of the article was presented at the 58th annual meeting of the Alabama Historical Association in Montgomery on April 22, 2005. 1 Invitation to Bridge Opening Ceremonies, June 14, 1927, Katherine Crampton Cochrane Collection, University of South Alabama Archives, Mobile (hereafter cited as Cochrane Collection, USA). A P R I L 2 0 1 0 111 structure’s gleaming rail. The dignitaries assembled on the deck of the bridge’s central span retreated quickly to the shelter of a specially erected pavilion until the shower passed. Soon the rain stopped, the sun reappeared, and the crowd’s festive spirit was restored. The day’s notables—some in linen suits and straw boaters or soft-brimmed Panamas, along with their elegantly dressed wives, sporting short bobs under cloche hats and wearing fashionable, calf-length summer frocks and T-strapped pumps—once more took their places on the five-span, steel-truss Tensaw River bridge, and the ceremony continued . The ceremony eagerly awaited in Mobile on this day was the formal dedication of the first bridge across Mobile Bay. More than ten miles long and connecting Mobile with Baldwin County on the east side of the bay, the bridge consisted of two multiple-span, steel-truss bridges, one over the Mobile River just north of the city at Magazine Point and the other over the confluence of the Tensaw and Spanish rivers. Dredged earthen embankments from Blakeley Island—where the roadway ran from the first bridge down the length of the island— crossed the mouth of Polecat Bay to the Tensaw River bridge, and thence across Chocaloochee Bay to the concrete-trestled Apalachee Causeway and beyond that to Blakeley River and the Eastern Shore.2 Two days before the scheduled events, the dedication program was printed on the front page of the Mobile Register. But as with all prescheduled programs, this, too, was subject to the vagaries of nature and circumstance, with the principals in the scheduled ceremonies all rising good-naturedly to the changes. After the interruption of the passing shower, Gordon Smith, the master of ceremonies and a prominent member of the Mobile business elite, remarked that “part of the program was the christening of the bridge, but that the Almighty intervened and christened it in His own way.” At his signal, 2 This description appears...

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