Schenectady and what is now the village of Scotia were populated at almost the same time, back around 1662. In fact, Alexander Lindsay Glen held an even earlier grant to the lands on the north bank of the Mohawk where the Glen-Sanders Mansion now sits. So from the earliest times, crossing the river was a matter of some importance. And yet it would be almost 1800 before a permanent bridge was attempted.
George Rogers Howell reports in “The History of the County of Schenectady, New York” that the “first bridge of importance and worthy of note” was an arched bridge starting at the foot of State Street. “It was begun in 1797, and when nearly completed, the winter following, was upset by the wind, taken down, and rebuilt on piers in 1803.” It wasn’t long before a better structure was needed, and designer Theodore Burr, who had recently built the first bridge across the Hudson (at Waterford), in 1808 created a suspension bridge of what would now be unique construction — it was built entirely of wood, arches, cables and all. This illustration, made from a photograph taken near the end of the bridge’s life in the 1870s, gives the appearance of a rickety, haphazard structure, but Howell says it was a thing of beauty: “This bridge, as remembered by most of our citizens, gives no idea of its early appearance of symmetry and beauty. Its subsequent disfigurement by the addition of several piers, and an unsightly covering over the whole, may have added to its solidity and ultimate preservation, but certainly destroyed all its original elegance of design and execution.”
A new bridge was built upon the existing piers in 1874. A toll on non-residents was collected by the Town of Glenville to pay the $60,000 cost of the bridge. A year later the Town purchased the privately owned Freeman’s Bridge, built by Volney Freeman in 1855, and received the tolls from that bridge as well .
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