Built at Mooringsport in 1914 to replace a ferry, the Historic Caddo Lake Drawbridge was constructed by the Midland Bridge Company of Kansas City, Missouri, under authority of the Caddo Parish Police Jury. Its vehicular bridge design used the vertical-lift system of James Alexander Low Waddell of Waddell and Harrington Bridges, allowing the center span to rise so tall oil equipment, especially Gulf Oil Company's pile driver, could pass; invented in 1893 and first introduced successfully in Chicago with the South Halsted Street Bridge, this bridge was a direct descendant of that structure. In the summer of 1941, just before World War II, United States Army maneuvers around Mooringsport brought General Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton to lead Red and Blue armies in the mock capture of the bridge, including bombing it with sacks of flour. In the mid-1940s ownership passed from Caddo Parish to the Louisiana Department of Highways, which later determined the bridge no longer needed to open and removed its concrete counterweights, dropping them into the lake; by the late 1970s its narrow width had reduced traffic to one alternating lane, and officials judged its useful life exhausted and began considering replacement. In 1989 the department received federal Highway Administration funds for a replacement project that called for a new two-lane bridge about fifty feet east of the old one and for the old bridge's destruction after completion, but a citizens' campaign led by Mooringsport native Darren N. Guin, with local, state, and federal support, sought instead to preserve it as a pedestrian walkway, landmark, and tourist attraction. After two years of negotiations, the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development and the Federal Highway Administration agreed to redirect removal funds to refurbishment if Caddo Parish accepted ownership and liability, and on June 26, 1991, the Caddo Parish Commissioners voted to place the bridge in the parish Department of Parks and Recreation. On July 24, 1991, the Historic American Engineering Record found the bridge nationally significant for its designer, its distinctive design, and its status as Louisiana's only surviving example of its type, making it eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, though a state law delayed the application until ownership changed. After the bridge was cleaned, painted, and closed to vehicles, ownership returned to Caddo Parish on October 3, 1995, and a rededication ceremony later that month celebrated the preservation of Mooringsport's chief landmark and those who had helped save it. Following a public hearing in Baton Rouge on June 4, 1996, the bridge was officially entered in the National Register of Historic Places on October 18, 1996, under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966.