The Susquehanna Bridge and Banking Company began building the covered bridge at Rock Run in 1813 and opened it in 1818, creating a connection between Harford and Cecil Counties. Its covering protected the wooden decking and trusses from weather, but the bridge faced repeated damage and destruction. After a fire in 1823, reportedly caused by a spark from a sleigh runner, it did not reopen until 1828. In 1854, vibrations set in motion by a herd of cattle crossing caused one span to collapse, and a ferry temporarily operated between the two spans during repairs. In 1856, ice floes in a storm carried away much of the bridge, and it was never rebuilt; several stone piers still stand in the river. The bridge reflected the early 1800s boom in American land transport and commerce and used Theodore Burr's patented Burr arch truss design, linking the crossing by way of three islands. Its wooden truss spans rested on granite abutments and piers quarried from the hillside on the Port Deposit side, and the whole complex, including roadways on the islands, extended one mile with a single corridor twenty-seven feet wide. When the Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal was built between 1836 and 1839, it cut through the roadway on the Harford side, requiring an added covered span over the canal to restore access. The tollhouse, later called Jersey Tollhouse though not by its builders, was erected for the corporation by Samuel Peck for $600, while Jonathan French built the tollhouse on the Port Deposit side. Bridge keepers lived and worked in the tollhouses, receiving shelter, a garden plot, and an annual salary of $100 while collecting tolls, regulating traffic ranging from people and poultry to wagons, buggies, and sleighs, and watching over the bridge's repair and structural safety against heavy use, floods, fire, ice gorges, and collisions with river craft. Today, the surviving tollhouse, an abutment from the canal crossing, the canal trough and towpath, and the islands and stone piers remain as traces of the once busy crossing that linked Cecil and Harford Counties, Baltimore and Philadelphia, and eastern Pennsylvania and tidewater Virginia.