The present bridge is the fourth to span the Delaware River at this location. 

At first, starting in 1735 one Andrew Dingman had run a flat boat ferry across the river between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. That continued until the first bridge was built in 1836. That structure survived only eleven years before flood waters washed an upstream bridge down into it, carrying both away. The Dingman family restarted the ferry. 

Somewhere around 1850, a second bridge was built. It only lasted four or five years before a terrific windstorm lifted it from its piers and dropped it into the river. Again, to the rescue, came the old Dingman’s Ferry boat. A year later, yet a third bridge was hastily erected. Its demise required neither flood nor wind. Shoddily constructed, it simply fell apart, plunging into the river. By then, it was Andrew Dingman the Third who restarted the reliable ferry service.

Finally, at the turn of the twentieth century, came the three Perkins brothers from Horseheads, New York. They were structural iron men, bridge builders, and they had in their possession three magnificent trusses of pin-hung wrought iron which they transported to the Delaware and erected upon stone piers in the river.  With no great ceremony, the Dingmans Bridge was opened for traffic in November, 1900.

This bridge is still open today. How does it survive where its predecessors did not? The company is committed to a rigorous program of inspection and repair.  A professional engineering firm inspects everything every year, above and below water, every rivet, nut and bolt, and on the basis of their report the company does yearly maintenance work.  The bridge is probably in even better shape today than when it was built.  

Throughout its hundred plus years of service, the bridge has never had a single serious accident. Oversized vehicles, disregarding posted limits, occasionally swipe off a board from the arched overhang by the toll booth. A car or truck driving too close to the side sometimes loses a mirror. But no serious accidents.

Tolls have not increased much in the past century. Historic records show that at the time the Dingmans Choice and Delaware Bridge Company was incorporated in Pennsylvania, in 1834, the bridge could collect “for every coach, landau, chariot, phaeton, or other pleasure carriage with four wheels drawn by four horses, the sum of fifty cents.” Two-horse wagons were 25 cents; a horse and rider, 10 cents; horse alone, 6 cents (which hardly seems fair since cattle were only 3 cents); a bicycle was 5 cents, or if a tandem, 6 cents; a pedestrian had to pay 2 cents except that then as now anyone going to a funeral or to church was afforded passage free. (There did seem to be an unusually high incidence of hearse travel over the bridge during the days of prohibition and rum-runners…).

The bridge was not damaged in any way from the floods of 2004 and the unexpected wrath of the subsequent Great Floods of 2005.

Today, there are government bridges up and down river, all modern and big, but the experience of crossing the hundred year old bridge at Dingman’s Ferry is nostalgia for some, commuter convenience for others, a unique blending of history, heritage and dedication for all.