Old Middlesex Turnpike Bridge

The Old Middlesex Turnpike Bridge carried the Middlesex Turnpike over the Concord River in South Billerica, between the Concord Road at Jaquith's and the west side of the river near the present River Pines neighborhood. The turnpike company was chartered in June 1805, and when it laid its road in a straight line through the town it crossed the river "a mile above the centre bridge, and leaving the village as far one side," as Hazen wrote. The bridge was built with the road, which was open by about 1810. When the dower of Dorcas Hill was set off in 1811 in the Joseph Hill farm by the river, the land was bounded in part by "the new Middlesex Turnpike." The official town map of 1831 draws the turnpike crossing the Concord River on its way to the Chelmsford line.

The new crossing took the through travel from the older bridge downstream. Hazen notes that "after the opening of the Middlesex turnpike, the Hill bridge and road crossing it fell into disuse and decay" (see Hill's Bridge). The turnpike itself did not last long as a through road; "the canal and the railroad left little for the turnpike, and its charter was repealed in 1841." By 1853 the Walling map no longer shows a road north of the Concord Road junction, so the bridge was gone or out of use by then. When Hazen wrote in 1883, the Jaquith Brothers' glue factory, begun in 1867, stood "near the old bridge of the Middlesex Turnpike."

No bridge has stood at the site since. The turnpike line on the west side of the river survives as Old Middlesex Turnpike, which the town's list of 1831-map roads accepted as public ways in October 2016 gives as running from the "Concord River" to a dead end past River Street Extension. In 1952 and 1953 the state laid out the Route 3 expressway along the line of the old turnpike, and the Route 3 Bridge over the Concord River of 1953 now carries the highway over the river close to the old crossing.