Newkirk Viaduct Monument

The Newkirk Viaduct Monument (also, Newkirk Monument) was erected in 1839 in present-day Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad to mark the 1838 completion of the Newkirk Viaduct, also called the Gray's Ferry Bridge, over the Schuylkill River. The bridge completed the first direct rail line between Philadelphia and Baltimore, Maryland — tracks that closely paralled the King's Highway, the main land route to the southern states.

On Aug. 14, 1838, the PW&B board of directors decided to name the bridge after company president Matthew Newkirk (1794-1868), a Philadelphia business and civic leader, and to commission a monument at its west end. (Earlier in the year, the company gave Newkirk a silver plate worth $1,000 ($22,491 today) to reward him for arranging the merger of four railroads that together built the Philadelphia-Baltimore line.)

Designed by Thomas Ustick Walter, who would go on to design the dome of the U.S. Capitol, the white marble monument consists of a 7-foot obelisk atop a 5-foot-square base inscribed with the names of the officials of the four companies.

The monument was installed along the western approach to the bridge and surrounded by a low iron fence. An 1895 account describes its location as "on a high bank in the angle formed by the junction of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad and the Chester Branch of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway just below the western end of the Gray's Ferry Bridge."

In 1872, the PW&B built a new mainline west of the Viaduct, and leased its old line to the Reading Railroad, which expanded the old track to a small railyard. In 1900, an article about the Viaduct's replacement noted the monument, and said, "On account of its inaccessibility and the dense foliage, it is scarcely ever seen."

The monument was moved, at some point after 1927, to a spot along the 1872 mainline. It was placed on the site of the demolished Gray's Ferry Station, just northeast of the 49th Street Bridge. For more than eight decades, it sat all but abandoned, in disrepair, and nearly forgotten, though it was visible to passengers traveling Amtrak's Northeast Corridor or SEPTA Regional Rail trains on the Airport Line and the Wilmington/Newark Line.

On November 17-18, 2016, the monument was moved once again, to a new concrete pad along the under-construction "Bartram's Mile" section of the Schuylkill River Trail.