For over ninety years, a large steel truss bridge crossed the Milk River just northeast of here, serving residents of the area. Built in 1911 by the Illinois Steel Bridge Company of Jacksonville, Illinois, it was one of at least six bridges the firm built in Valley County between 1910 and 1913. The bridge carried ranchers and homesteaders living north of the river to Tampico, a community established as a water stop on the Great Northern Railway’s main line in the late 1890s. Tampico boomed with the arrival of hundreds of homesteaders beginning in 1910, and at its height about 1917 it had a population of over 50 people and a substantial business district. By the early Twenties, the town lay on the Theodore Roosevelt International Highway, later renamed U.S. Highway 2, and a 1921 guidebook said there were good camping sites along the Milk River on the north side of the road near the old bridge. The old highway still survives as a county road on the northeast side of the railroad tracks.