Cleveland County, North Carolina
The King Street Overhead Bridge is a reinforced concrete Modeme-style rigid-frame vehicular bridge erected in 1938-1939 in Kings Mountain, Cleveland County. It has a three-lane asphalt bed, flanked by slightly raised concrete sidewalks, that carries King StreetlBusiness US 74 across the paired depressed tracks of the Norfolk Southern Railroad. The open arched span
above
the tracks, measuring about forty-eight feet in length and forty-nine feet in width, is supported by abutments on each side that carry the street to its intersection with Battleground and Railroad avenues, at its east and west ends, respectively. The bridge occupies an elevated site in central Kings Mountain, one of the highest in town, that was raised to provide clearance for trains. Because of its location at the north edge of the historic business district and the prominence of
the railroad tracks, the bridge is a highly visible landmark in Kings Mountain. The small industrial town in the southeast comer of Cleveland County is about five and one-half miles north of the North Carolina/South Carolina state line and about seven miles north of Kings Mountain where the Revolutionary War battle was fought in 1780. Craven, the chief bridge engineer for the North Carolina State Highway and Public Works Commission and erected by L. Construction began in October 1938 and the bridge was completed in
April 1939. The unpainted surface of the concrete has weathered through the course of sixty-five years and slightly exposed the sand and gravel mixed aggregate in its cement, giving it an unintended, granular appearance. The bridge, entirely symmetrical in its fabric and finish, is aligned on a true east/west axis above the tracks which, at this point, carry on a near-true north/south axis for about two blocks through the old downtown commercial district. The bridge is supported on paired reinforced concrete abutments whose elevations are blind and continue to bear the horizontal ghostmarks of the
wood formwork erected for the poured-in-place concrete supports. The respective faces of the abutments fronting on the tracks are flat and framed at their comers by pilasters whose shallow proj ecting outer north and south faces feature three parallel incised lines. These lines stop just short of the three-part stepped tops of the pilasters. Replacement metal lamp standards are
centered atop each of the pilasters. The pilasters also serve as the spring point from which the curved wingwalls of the abutments begin their gentle arched ease into the grass-covered slopes of the cut. The three-part incision on the pilaster faces is repeated in a shallow three-part stepped horizontal molding across the top of the wingwalls which, in effect, give them a recessed-panel appearance.
