During Piqua's early settlement period, the only way to cross the Great Miami River was by fording at a low-water point just south of a big bend in the river at the present Shawnee Bridge site. In 1820, local citizens formed the Piqua Bridge Company to build Piqua's first permanent bridge there, using sycamore tree stumps as pilings under the leadership of Charles Hilliard. Though somewhat rickety, it carried the heavy traffic of the Piqua to Urbana Road, and trustees even warned users not to gallop horses across it. Traffic declined in 1822 when that road was rerouted to the ford at Ash Street, but the bridge remained and was strengthened in 1832 with new stone embankments to resist periodic floods. It survived the 1835 flood but was washed away in 1847. Because a crossing between Piqua and the new Village of Huntersville was essential, a new bridge opened at the site within a year. To better withstand floodwaters, that 1847 bridge was built as a covered bridge with walls, a roof, and enlarged stone abutments, reflecting the state of the art for wooden bridges before iron truss construction became favored in progressive nineteenth-century communities. In 1886, the covered bridge was demolished and replaced by an iron truss bridge erected by the Columbia Bridge Company of Dayton, Ohio, but floodwaters on March 23, 1898, destroyed its two truss spans. Another iron truss bridge with a large long span replaced it that same year, only to be heavily damaged by the Great Flood of 1913. For a time the site was left without a bridge, but a citizens committee led by businessman, inventor, and Piqua Mayor George W. Lorimer successfully pressed city and county officials to fund a replacement. The new bridge linking East Main in Shawnee and South Main in Piqua became the community's first rebar reinforced concrete bridge, and at its formal dedication on June 25, 1915, it was named the Lorimer Bridge in honor of Lorimer's efforts. Local folklore later tied the bridge to a 1917 story in which Henry Houdini escaped from a locked and chained box after being pushed from it into the Great Miami River, though his trunk was said to have stuck in the mud, and to a late-1930s feat in which future World War II flying ace Don Gentile flew his Aerosport bi-plane under the middle span. The Lorimer-Shawnee Bridge lasted longer than any previous span at the site, surviving for more than ninety years until it was demolished in 2005 and replaced by a new decorative concrete bridge, formally dedicated on September 01, 2006.