Mathews Bridge in Jacksonville, Florida

The Mathews Bridge is a 7,382-foot cantilevered steel truss bridge over the St. Johns River in Jacksonville, listed by FDOT under a second name, the Arlington Bridge.

The Florida Department of Transportation's Historic Highway Bridges of Florida report lists it as the John E. Mathews Bridge, also called the Arlington Bridge, FDOT bridge No. 720076 and Florida Master Site File number 8DU1554, carrying SR-10A over the St. Johns River. It describes a massive cantilevered steel Warren through truss bridge with six main span panels and 59 steel stringer approach spans. The 810-foot cantilevered main span truss is flanked by two continuous span trusses, so most of the bridge's length is approach spans rather than the high truss over the shipping channel.

On the east side the bridge feeds the Arlington Expressway. FDOT District 2's project handout for the Arlington Expressway (State Road 115) resurfacing describes the work as running from the Mathews Bridge to Southside Boulevard, starting April 2023 with completion in fall 2024, at a cost of $26 million, by Superior Construction. FDOT's report calls the structure historically notable for its type, its contribution to the area's development and its landmark status in the city. In the same report's Duval County list it sits between the 1941 Main Street lift bridge and the 1967 Hart Bridge, the other two historic St. Johns River highway crossings in Jacksonville.

Reynolds, Smith and Hills of Jacksonville designed the Mathews Bridge, Bethlehem Steel fabricated it, and the Merritt-Chapman and Scott Corporation built it between 1951 and 1953.

Those firms are named in the FDOT historic bridge report, which calls the Jacksonville firm Reynolds, Smith and Hills by its initials RS&H. The same report lists RS&H again among the designers of the bridge's 2007 deck replacement, more than 50 years after the original design.

In the FDOT record, only the designer is identified as a Jacksonville firm. The bridge's steel truss is the only cantilevered Warren through truss of its type still in use, according to the same report, which is why the engineering criterion figures in its historic eligibility.

Judge Mathews, the bridge's namesake, was a Florida legislator and Florida Supreme Court justice who urged a bridge across the St. Johns River at this Jacksonville site from the early 1930s.

The FDOT report says the Jacksonville bridge was dedicated to Judge John E. Mathews, a Florida state legislator and Chief Justice of the 1955 Supreme Court, who had urged building on the site since the early 1930s and helped gather funding for construction.

The FDOT text ties his name to a long campaign rather than to a single vote: he urged a crossing at this point on the river for about two decades before construction began in 1951. The bridge he championed was one of several Duval County crossings paid for with tolls, as the next section explains.

Yes, the Mathews Bridge was toll-financed, like several Duval County river crossings, and its tolls were removed in 1988.

The FDOT report notes that tolls originally financed at least three bridges in Duval County besides the Hart and Dames Point bridges: the Fuller Warren Bridge, a bascule span just south of downtown built in 1954; the Trout River Bridge, an arched girder bridge built in 1926; and the Mathews Bridge, a steel through truss bridge built in 1953.

The Jacksonville Transportation Authority's history timeline records that the agency began in 1955 as the Jacksonville Expressway Authority, formed by the Florida Legislature, two years after the Mathews opened, and that in 1988 tolls at the Mathews Bridge, Fuller Warren Bridge, Hart Bridge, Trout River Bridge and J. Turner Butler Boulevard were removed.

The original open steel grid deck on the Mathews main span over the St. Johns River was replaced in kind in 1997 and then replaced with a solid deck surface in 2007.

According to the FDOT report, the 1997 work on the Jacksonville span responded to complaints about poor rideability and used in-kind materials, so the lightweight steel open grid remained. In 2007 the grating was replaced with a solid deck surface designed by Hardesty and Hanover, RS&H and BPA Associates, with the work done by PCL Contractors.

The deck work came before the eligibility finding: FDOT's report records both the 2007 solid deck and the State Historic Preservation Office's October 2007 determination that the Jacksonville bridge is eligible for the National Register, which rests on the truss type and the bridge's role in the city's development.

The Jacksonville crossing is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, as determined by the Florida State Historic Preservation Office in October 2007, but FDOT's inventory does not record it as listed.

The FDOT report finds it eligible under Criterion A in Community Planning and Development and Transportation, for its associations with the historic and continued development of Jacksonville, and under Criterion C in Engineering as a high-integrity example of a cantilevered steel Warren through truss bridge and the only bridge of its type still in use. Its summary table codes the Mathews as P-EL: 2007.

The Hart Bridge, completed in 1967, has a 1,093-foot main unit that the same report calls the longest bridge span of all highway bridges in Florida. Of the two Jacksonville through truss crossings in the table, the Mathews is the older by 14 years.

Two later toll-financed crossings fill out the picture. The FDOT report describes the Hart Bridge as a four-lane, 17-span continuous steel through truss 3,844 feet long, built from 1964 to November 1967 to a design by Sverdrup and Parcel of St. Louis. It dates the opening of the cable-stayed Napoleon Bonaparte Broward Bridge at Dames Point to 1988 and says its central span is the longest of its type in the U.S.; the JTA timeline instead records the Dames Point Bridge opening to the general public in 1989, so the two official sources differ by a year.

A replacement is in long-range plans but not scheduled. The North Florida TPO's 2050 Long Range Transportation Plan final report lists the Mathews Bridge (SR 115) as a planned bridge replacement project, east bank to west bank, in Duval County. A City of Jacksonville Citizens Planning Advisory Committee summary from its March 2024 meeting records the committee's TPO liaison reporting a proposed plan to replace the Mathews Bridge in the 2036 to 2045 time frame, noting that the project has been on the long-range plan repeatedly. The TPO plan and the FDOT handout call the route SR 115, while FDOT's historic inventory lists the bridge on SR-10A. The same summary shows FDOT closing the eastbound lanes on March 15, 16 and 17, 2024, for work on the bridge.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against FDOT's Historic Highway Bridges of Florida report, the JTA history timeline, the North Florida TPO's 2050 plan report, an FDOT District 2 project handout, and a March 2024 city advisory committee summary.