Jefferson was regarded in the mid-1800s as the steamboat entry port into Texas, but after the Army Corps of Engineers cleared the Red River Raft, the water level near the town fell and steamboats could no longer reach it year-round. In 1873, Jefferson was first connected to the national rail network through the Texas and Pacific Railway, and in the 1890s the Sherman, Shreveport and Southern Railway built tracks east from Jefferson to the Texas-Louisiana state line; this railway was later acquired by the Missouri-Kansas-Texas system. The first bridge over Big Cypress Bayou was a wooden trestle, but in 1907 an iron bridge built in 1897 by the Phoenix Bridge Company of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, was installed here, allowing commercial and private trains to cross high above the water. American architect and bridge builder William Howe (1803-1852) patented the Howe Truss Bridge in 1840, a load-bearing truss of connected elements usually forming triangular units, with diagonal structural beams sloping toward the center in compression and vertical web members in tension. Truss bridges were common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The bridge was decommissioned in 1992 when a newer bridge was built to the east, and the Kansas City Southern Railway Company, which then owned it, donated it to Marion County. No longer in use, it remains as one of the last remaining iron Howe truss railroad bridges in the United States accessible for public view and stands as a backdrop for the Port Jefferson History and Nature Center.