When River Road connected Selbysport and Friendsville, the original way into town passed the cemetery, crossed Bear Creek at the cement arch bridge location, and went down Walnut Street to Morris Avenue, while some people crossed on foot by the railroad trestle farther downstream where the Route 53 bridge now stands. An iron works stood upstream near where I-68 passes overhead. Along the south side of Walnut Street were homes including the Lytle family house, with a stable on the creek side beside their meat market, and a large sawmill stood along the north side of the creek behind The Bear Creek Lumber Company store. In the great flood of 1924, Bear Creek overflowed its banks and smashed the meat market against the side of the Bear Creek Lumber Company, which served as the J.W. McCullough Company headquarters. After timber resources collapsed, J.W. McCullough turned to coal mining, and the lumber company store became the company store for miners. Karol and Bessie Rush briefly made and sold ice cream in the building, apartments there were later vacated, and the McCullough building was demolished in 2001. The Old Selbysport Road Bridge, built in 1920 by the Luten Bridge Co. of York, Pennsylvania, is the longest-spanning concrete single arch bridge in Garrett County and is typical of the 1888 patented concrete arch bridge designs of Daniel B. Luten, while the Barnes Bridge farther up Bear Creek is also a Luten arch bridge. In 1993, Paul Schroyer videotaped a cougar moving up the side of Bear Creek about 1/2 mile upstream from this location, and Maryland DNR biologist Ms. Leslie Johnston said that although there had been hundreds of sightings, this one was on tape.