From the 1850s through the 1960s, Meadville's 4th Ward was a neighborhood of frame houses and small industries, home to railroad workers and tradesmen, extending from French Creek to Park Avenue and bisected by Dock Street, now Mead Avenue, Mill Run, and the railroad, with the Water Street business district at its eastern edge. After 1900, older mills and machine shops gave way to warehouses and coal yards, and in the early 1970s urban renewal and construction of the French Creek Parkway transformed the 4th Ward into a much different landscape. For 143 years, a bridge carried Mead Avenue, originally Dock Street, over French Creek at Meadville's western gateway. The first crossing there was a wooden covered bridge built in 1828 to link the town with the western part of the county. By 1870, civic leaders wanted a modern showpiece bridge, and in 1871 Crawford County hired the Penn Bridge Company to build an ornate iron bridge as part of broader civic improvements that included a new market house, a new courthouse, and wider city streets, amid prosperity and population growth brought by railroad construction and the oil boom in the 1860s. The new wrought-iron and cast-iron bridge was a Double Intersection Pratt through-truss, or Whipple truss, whose diagonal members extended across multiple panels, making it well suited to the 263-foot span over French Creek; its keystone columns were patented products of the Keystone Bridge Company and were fabricated by the Union Iron Mills of Pittsburgh, both early ventures of Andrew Carnegie. In 1912, Baltimore trusses were added around the 40-year-old Whipple truss to strengthen it for trolley cars going to nearby Conneaut Lake Resort, in work completed in one week by the Rodgers Brothers Company of Albion, Pennsylvania, with costs shared by the trolley company and Crawford County. Intended to extend the bridge's life by only another ten years, the strengthened structure remained essentially unchanged for another century, becoming one of the oldest metal bridges in western Pennsylvania and one of the region's last remaining Whipple truss bridges, before deferred maintenance, collision damage, weather, and the demands of modern traffic led to its closure in 2007 and replacement in 2014.