Read Remembering Conshohocken and West Conshohocken for Free Online

surface looked like cobblestone but was actually wooden blocks. The blocks were coated with oil and creosote, and when it rained, the blocks became very slippery like ice and were very dangerous. Within six months, the blocks were removed and a hard surface was installed.
    Minnie Harrison, an East Fourth Avenue resident, penned a poem that ran in the Conshohocken Recorder in November 1921 pertaining to the opening of the bridge:
    Across the Schuylkill’s rippling tide
    A mighty bridge is flung
    And it is long and high and wide
    And open to the sun .
    It welds the East unto the West
    With strong and fervent tie
    And just beneath on either side
    The many factories lie .
    And on the West are glorious hills
    With trees and foliage fair
    And water from the coldest spring
    Azure skies and pure fresh air .
    And in the vale are many homes
    And honest hearts and true
    If you’re a stranger in the town
    We’ll gladly welcome you .
    And there’s no fairer valley
    Within the land of Penn
    Than by the river Schuylkill
    With its loyal maids and men .
    The concrete bridge built in 1921 may have been the finest bridge in the nation at that time, but by the 1970s it was in deplorable condition. Major holes started showing up in the sidewalks and the roadbed, and then the railing started to deteriorate. The writing was on the wall. Conshohocken was about to embark on a federal urban renewal project that would take the town from rags to riches, but a new bridge was needed.
    A mighty explosion in the spring of 1986 brought the 1921 structure down, and work began on the new $12 million bridge. If you’re keeping score, the covered bridge coast nearly $12,000, the 1921 bridge cost a cool $638,500 and in 1987, the fifty-two-foot-wide span cost $12 million; that equates to nearly $1 million for every hundred feet of the bridge. John Capozzi, who was the president of the Conshohocken Chamber of Commerce in 1987, said it best as he spoke from the bridge deck during the grand opening on November 27, 1987: “To us, this is the most important 1,380 feet of road surface in the state of Pennsylvania.”
    Over the years, two efforts have been made to change the name of the bridge. The first was in 1987, when the Conshohocken Chamber of Commerce suggested that the name be changed to the Conshohocken Bridge. The second attempt came at a West Conshohocken Council meeting in 2000, when veteran John DiRusso proposed changing the name of the bridge to Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge. While both name changes were taken very seriously, after nearly three centuries, the name remains Matsonford Bridge.

Part Three
Industry
I T A LL S TARTED WITH A S HOVEL H EAD
    Iron furnaces and forges began operating in this area in the early days of Pennsylvania. Ore was dug out of the ground from a number of locations throughout the area. Thomas Rutter started his forge on Manatawny Creek, at the present Montgomery-Berks County line. He built his forge in 1716, and it became Pennsylvania’s first iron industry.
    In 1832, James Wood and his son Alan began making steel in a one-room building alongside the Schuylkill Canal in Conshohocken. Nearly a century later, in 1920, the Alan Wood Steel Company employed more than five thousand local residents and produced more than 8 percent of the nation’s output of steel.
    It all started when James Wood established a “smithy” near Hickorytown (formerly known as Pigeontown) more than ninety years after Rutter started his forge. Wood became known as a “black and white” smith because in addition to the ordinary work of the blacksmith, he also made kitchen or domestic wares.
    James Wood was the grandson of a Dublin Quaker immigrant named James who fled to America in 1725 and settled in Gwynedd. James, the grandson, was born on October 23, 1771, on a farm in Montgomery County, near Narcissa or Five Points. Wood recalled that General George Washington was a guest at the Wood home in 1777, when