A camelback truss is not a fashion statement. It is a Pratt truss with a top chord shaped into a low arch - five slopes instead of a flat run - that lets the bridge carry a heavier deck for less steel. Engineers built them between roughly 1880 and 1935, when American railroads and rural road agencies needed sturdy medium-span crossings on a budget. The math is honest: every diagonal works in tension under load, every vertical in compression, and the broken-line top chord lets the engineer concentrate steel where the moment is highest. The deck is a plank floor topped with a macadam road surface. Underneath, the metal looks like a child's drawing of a bridge until you start counting rivets.

The river the bridge crosses runs through what was once industrial country. Through much of the nineteenth century, this stretch of the Deep River was the site of coal pits, iron foundries, and copper mining operations - some of the few hard-rock workings in the Carolina Piedmont. Bridges have served this crossing since at least 1833. A nineteenth-century fieldstone pier still holds up the present bridge on the north end, probably the surviving pier of an earlier structure called Evans Bridge after Peter Evans, whose plantation Egypt lay on the south bank. The plantation name was a piece of Old South theatre. The work that built it was not.

By 1979 the North Carolina Department of Transportation had identified thirty-five metal truss bridges - eight of them camelbacks - that deserved formal recognition as important examples of early-twentieth-century engineering. Truss Bridge No. 155, as the NCDOT calls it, is one of only four camelback trusses still standing anywhere in North Carolina. The new concrete crossing opened in 1992. Ownership of the old bridge passed to the Deep River Park Association, which preserves it in place as part of a Rails-to-Trails route along the river corridor. The deck is closed to vehicles. It is open to feet.

Deep River Park surrounds the bridge with picnic tables, a boat ramp for kayaks and canoes, and the kind of quiet that southern Piedmont woodlands deliver when nobody is logging them. Geocachers come for the hidden caches near the abutments. Cyclists ride the Rails-Trails route through the woods. The mining ruins are mostly gone, swallowed by hardwood second growth, but the river itself still drops over old fall lines that once powered the foundries. The bridge stands across the water with the new bridge visible just downstream, an honest contrast: a hundred and twenty-five years of riveted steel versus a few decades of poured concrete, both still doing their job.