In 1880 the people of Madrid began discussing replacing their log bridge, first built in the winter of 1803-4 and rebuilt and repaired many times. The town considered wood, stone, and iron, and held special town meetings on April 4 and May 13, 1882 to raise funds and appoint a committee to work with the highway commissioners. Plans and specifications were obtained from Hinds & Hodgkins of Watertown, N.Y.; the stonework contract went to M. L. & M. A. of Cleveland of the same place; and the iron railing contract was awarded to Gates Curtis of Ogdensburg. A special town meeting considered building a stone bridge across Grass River at Madrid Village and authorizing the supervisor to borrow up to twelve thousand five hundred dollars on the town's credit for its construction. Work began on Monday, August 23, 1882, and was completed in three months without delay or accident, while a temporary wooden bridge stood upstream below the dam. Engineers and stonemasons from Scotland designed and built the bridge, using stone quarried from the end of the dam at the bridge's northwest end. Its piers, six feet wide and twenty-six feet long, rest on the rock bed of the stream. The bridge is four hundred feet long with nine arches, with spans of one thirty-two feet, one thirty-six feet, and seven thirty-eight feet, and its total cost including grading was nearly seventeen thousand dollars. On Tuesday, November 28, 1882, its completion was celebrated with music, speeches, dinner in the town hall, a procession from the public square led by Professor Easton's full band, ceremonies at the center of the bridge, and preparations for laying a cornerstone. Ruth Goodnow, born in December 1873, later recalled that much of the work was done by hand with chisels and hammers, that huge blocks of gray granite were sunk into the riverbed after rock was sometimes blasted away for a firm foundation, and that the finished stone arches were shaped with such precision that added pressure interlocked them more firmly. She also remembered the east-side pedestrian sidewalk, originally rough but later worn smooth, and the iron railings from which people watched the swirling grasses in the riverbed that gave Grass River its name.