REHOBOTH'S SILVER LAKE BRIDGE

REHOBOTH'S SILVER LAKE BRIDGE

Cape Gazette's View Points, Tuesday, January 1, 2019, shows the New Bridge over Silver Lake at Rehoboth, a 1955 era postcard of Delaware Archives' collection of George an Irene Caley, indicating the bridge was fairly new. OK, there is a news item in the

Wilmington News Journal, Saturday July 30, 1938 which states that the bridge is to be closed for a few days while contractors E. Hammond & Co., make test before actual work on the new bridge begins on

September 3, for a 519 foot long, 40 foot wide bridge for automobiles and

pedestrians. So lets take it that the 'fairly new' bridge on the 1955 postcard

was built in 1938 and 1939.

Also from Cape Gazette's History in Photographs , May 29, 2018, is a

picture of Rehoboth's Silver Lake Bridge on a 1929 postcard showing a

wooden bridge while the 1955 bridge is cement.

A Saturday, August 28, 1926 Wilmington News Journal news item

mentions the main thoroughfare of Rehoboth Heights , the north & south

Bayard Avenue, eighty feet wide with a park in the center , touches a

Silver Lake Bridge now under construction , which will carry Bayard

Avenue across Silver Lake to Dewey Beach .

Does not this say the wooden bridge on the 1929 postcard was built

in 1926.

A 1925 ad in the Wilmington Evening Journal for Rehoboth Heights,

on Silver Lake and Atlantic Ocean, already an established section of

Rehoboth Beach. .

In 1866 Rehoboth Heights was a beautiful farm, bound by Lewes Canal,

Silver Lake, once Newboulds Pond, and the Atlantic, was the pride of its

owner who would not sell. Yet later he did sell, received $1500 and was

pleased. A few years later it brought $5000 and the purchaser was

considered 'crazy'. Then Robert Hinkley , the owner and builder of

Bellhaven Hotel, paid $15,000 for the farm. 1925 a group headed by

Henry Conant bought it for $45000 and began development of the 150

acre farm. Streets, water and sewer have been added, as has electricity.

On March 8^th, 1927 town commissioners Major Harry Satterfield, Hall

Anderson, Fred Ross, Wm Sipple , Ralph Paynter, and Bill Tappan,

met in the fire house to lay out a route for concrete streets being

authorized by Legislature. This route starts at First Street and Brooklyn

Avenue, to Rehoboth Avenue, to the boardwalk and circle back to First

thence to Lake Gerar on Lake Street at the Henlopen Hotel, out Columbia

Avenue to Fifth Street.

As Rehoboth Heights is annexed the street at Second Street and Rehoboth

down Bayard Avenue to the county bridge across Silver Lake will be

concrete. Also it has been decided to close the town dump now at Lake

Gerar and Irenee duPont's Lake Gerar project and will be filled, and set

with trees.

Abstract: Wilmington News Journal newspapers 1924 to 1937.