Drive east out of town on the National Pike and you'll hit the fencing before you hit the bridge. Orange mesh, a chain-link gate, a few gaps in the stonework where blocks used to sit flush. Most people who pass it assume it's a routine state repair job, the kind of thing that closes a scenic pull-off for a season and reopens quietly once the contractors clear out.
That's only half the story. While the Casselman River Bridge sits closed to foot traffic, the National Park Service just added it to the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, a federal designation that has nothing to do with the cracked mortar and everything to do with a man named Josiah Henson, who crossed this same span in 1828 on his way toward a freedom he wouldn't actually reach for years. The announcement came in early August 2026, only a few weeks before this was written, which means most people in Grantsville have driven past the fencing without knowing the bridge behind it just picked up a second reason to matter.
What The Fence Is Actually For
Start with the repair, because it explains why you can't walk across right now. The bridge was closed to pedestrians after Maryland Park Service engineers found cracked stonework, missing grout, and stones that had worked themselves loose after two centuries of freeze and thaw. Rather than patch it in place, the Maryland Department of Transportation and Department of Natural Resources chose a slower, more deliberate fix: crews marked, labeled, and photographed every stone, then dismantled sections of the arch and hauled them to a local warehouse to be cleaned and reshaped. The work began in the summer of 2025, and the off-site setup let the contractor keep working through the winter months in a climate-controlled space instead of losing the season to weather.
State Highway District Engineer Linda Puffenbarger framed the goal simply, saying the finished project will offer a safe and scenic connection over the river for bicyclists and pedestrians. That's the part of the story that shows up on road-project signage. It's not the part that made national news.
The Designation Nobody Saw Coming
The Underground Railroad Network to Freedom is a National Park Service program that recognizes sites connected to resistance against enslavement, and it doesn't hand out entries lightly. Casselman River Bridge State Park earned its spot because of Josiah Henson, an enslaved man who crossed the bridge in 1828 while traveling from Kentucky toward Montgomery County, Maryland, in what turned out to be an unsuccessful attempt to purchase his own freedom. At the time, the bridge was about fifteen years old and still the largest stone arch bridge in the country.
Henson eventually did reach freedom, later founding a settlement and a laborers' school in Dawn, Canada, and writing an account of his life that became a direct source of inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. That's a significant enough connection on its own. What makes the designation land differently once you know the details is that Henson wasn't hiding when he crossed. He was traveling the National Road with permission, in the open, which is not the image most people carry around when they hear the words Underground Railroad.
An Open Road, Not A Hidden One
That contrast is the whole reason this spot matters historically. The National Road ran through Pennsylvania, a free state, on its way between Maryland and what was then northwestern Virginia, and that geography made the corridor useful to people who needed exactly the kind of secrecy Henson didn't. Uniontown, Pennsylvania, roughly six miles north across the state line, was home to a documented free Black community and is a recognized stopping point on the Underground Railroad in its own right.
Free and enslaved Black men worked the National Road as teamsters, drivers, and coachmen, and that work gave some freedom seekers an opening. A person could hide among goods piled in a wagon bed, slip away with a borrowed or stolen coach under cover of darkness, or simply walk the route on foot at night, using the same road that Henson had crossed openly in daylight. The bridge didn't need to be a hiding place to matter. It only needed to sit on the route that made hiding possible a few miles further on.
Three Centuries, Same Eighty Feet
Strip away the restoration fencing and the federal designation for a moment and you're left with a plain fact: very few structures in Garrett County have this many layers of American history stacked on the same eighty feet of stone.
Long before it was a bridge, the crossing itself carried a name. In 1755, a young George Washington, then a military aide to General Edward Braddock, forded the Casselman River at this spot during Braddock's expedition against a French fort near what's now Pittsburgh. Braddock's army crossed here on the way out and retreated over the same ground after being defeated. The name that stuck was Little Crossings, decades before anyone laid a single stone for the bridge itself.
When the bridge went up in 1813 and 1814, builder David Shriver Jr., who supervised construction of the Cumberland Road, staked his professional reputation on the design. He reportedly stood underneath the finished arch the night before its public unveiling while workers pulled the supporting timbers, betting his name on stonework holding its own weight. It held, and the bridge carried stagecoaches, wagons, and foot traffic continuously from 1813 until 1933, when a modern steel span took over what's now US Route 40 Alternate. Maryland made it a state park in 1957, decades before anyone at the National Park Service connected it to Henson's story.
Three uses, three eras, one crossing. The restoration underway right now isn't just fixing cracked mortar. It's the reason MDNR and MDOT are describing the goal as keeping the bridge standing for another two centuries as a National Historic Landmark, not just repaired but preserved as the record of all three chapters at once.
What's Still Open This Fall
If you're planning to walk the grounds this season, here's what the closure actually covers and what it doesn't:
- The bridge itself remains closed to foot traffic during the restoration, with fencing in place around the structure.
- The park stays open for picnicking, with tables and grills available on the grounds around the bridge.
- The Casselman River is stocked by the Department of Natural Resources, and anglers can still fish it at locations outside the state park boundary even while the bridge stays closed.
- Spruce Forest Artisan Village sits just across the road, a cluster of historic log cabins where working artisans sell pottery, woodwork, and textiles. Hours vary by individual artisan and shift with the season, so calling ahead or checking a shop's own hours before a special trip is worth the extra step.
- Penn Alps Restaurant & Craft Shop, built near the same crossing that made this stretch of road a commercial hub in the first place, sits right next door.
None of that requires the bridge to be open. The picnic tables, the river, and the artisan cabins across the road were never part of the closure to begin with.
Why This Is Worth Knowing If You Already Live Here
It's easy to drive past a fenced-off landmark for months and stop noticing it entirely, filing it under road construction and moving on. The Casselman River Bridge earned its federal designation precisely because the plainest version of its story, an old stone bridge on an old road, was never the whole story. A young Washington forded that crossing before there was a bridge to name. Josiah Henson walked over it in daylight on a road that quietly served people who couldn't. And the crews cleaning and reshaping those stones right now are working to make sure the next chapter of that record still stands two hundred years from here.
That's the kind of detail about a hometown that doesn't show up on a state park brochure, and it's the sort of local texture we like keeping an eye on at Homes by Pamela Terry. If you're curious what else is changing around Grantsville this fall, or you're thinking about property anywhere along the Cumberland-Frostburg corridor, reach out. Work With Pamela.
