Route 3 Bridge over the Concord River
The Route 3 bridge carries the expressway across the Concord River in South Billerica, upstream of the Middle Bridge. This stretch of river had been crossed once before by a through road. The Middlesex Turnpike, chartered in 1805 and rerouted in 1806 to run "as near an air-line as possible" from Bedford to Tyngsborough, crossed "Concord River a mile above the centre bridge." The turnpike drew little local traffic, the canal and the railroad took its business, and its charter was repealed in 1841. Hazen located the Jaquith glue factory, built in 1867, "near the old bridge of the Middlesex Turnpike."
In the early 1950s the state relocated U.S. Route 3 out of the town centers between Route 128 in Burlington and the Lowell bypass in Chelmsford, as a four-lane divided highway with limited access. Billerica's 1949 report already spoke of "a new Lowell Turnpike ... through West and South Billerica as now planned," and the state laid out the Billerica section in 1952 and 1953. The river bridge, built in 1953 to plans by the engineer Hugh P. Duffill, was a pair of parallel reinforced concrete deck arches of two 79-foot spans each, 168 feet long, with arch rings marked by a raised "voussoir" treatment.
The arches were replaced in the Route 3 North project, the state's first design-build highway contract, in which Modern Continental Construction widened 21 miles of Route 3 from Route 128 to the New Hampshire line to three lanes each way and replaced 40 bridges. The work took 42 months and was finished early in 2005. The present bridge is a steel beam bridge about 204 feet long, built in 2004.
References
- MACRIS BIL.922
- Hazen, History of Billerica (1883): the Middlesex Turnpike crossing Concord River a mile above the centre bridge
- State highway layouts in Billerica, including the 1952-1953 layouts of relocated Route 3
- FHWA project profile: Route 3 North design-build-operate project (completed 2005)
- U.S. Route 3 in Massachusetts (Wikipedia)