In the waning months of 1954, the city of Lawrenceburg was busy replacing the old iron bridge on Old Waynesboro Road near the entrance to David Crockett State Park. In its place, they were erecting one of three new modern concrete bridges.

But bridge construction stopped when workers found something extraordinary buried deep in the mud of Shoal Creek that winter. In fact, no work was able to be done at all until special heavy equipment was brought in to remove what the crews found.

Lawrence County has exceptional roads for a county its size. The completion of the U.S. Highway 64 bypass last year was a major milestone in the history of the county’s infrastructure. It was also, in a way, the culmination of a sixty-year road improvement project.

The approach to Lawrenceburg from the west on U.S. Highway 64 was once a dangerous, two-lane route, full of dizzying curves and hairpin turns, much of which survives today as “Old Waynesboro Road” in the vicinity of the city’s water filtration plant. In 1953, the State Highway Department decided to straighten a mile-long segment of that highway between Glenn Springs Road and Waterloo Street.

To build a modern, straight stretch of highway between these two points required the construction of three bridges with deep concrete piers. One bridge was built on Crowson Creek, and two were built across Shoal Creek. The central of those three bridges is where workmen made a fascinating discovery.

M.E. Walker, the contractor who built those bridges, told the Lawrence County Historical Society at that time that his crews were “excavating for a pier on the west bank of Shoal Creek, between the [old] iron bridge and Hope Springs,” when they suddenly unearthed “a portion of an old dam” buried fourteen feet in the ground.

And what’s more, the remnants of that dam were made completely of wood and joined together with wooden pegs, without the benefit of a single nail.

According to Edward G. Parkes, the dam remnants were built by his great-great-uncle, William Parkes for operation of Hope Cotton Mills, which William established shortly after arriving in Lawrenceburg in the mid-1820s.

Despite roughly 130 years of exposure to the elements, the dam section was still remarkably structurally sound, and it did not yield without a fight. Walker was forced to bring special machinery to the job site in order to pry the old dam from the earth.