A host of prominent figures were instrumental in building of original Wilson Bridge. With the New Deal burgeoning the size of Washington, DC, the need to build new bridges over the Potomac River was foreseen by President Franklin Roosevelt. Some two decades later, the specific cause of building a new bridge from Alexandria, Virginia to Oxon Hill, Maryland was championed in the 1950s by Senator Albert Gore (Sr.). In 1954, two years before signing the Defense and Interstate Act [as it is commonly called], President Dwight Eisenhower enacted a bill “to authorize and direct the construction of bridges over the Potomac River.”

A sum of $14,925,000 was authorized for building the new crossing. Originally dubbed the “Jones Point Bridge,” the bridge was renamed as part of centennial commemorations of President Woodrow Wilson’s birth, and appropriately so. In the pantheon of presidential transportation leadership, President Wilson merits a place of honor -- he signed the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, which created the federal-aid highway program tha t remains to this day.

Construction of the bridge began in March 1958, supervised by the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, the predecessor of the Federal Highway Administration. The structure was completed in December 1961 and opened to traffic.

Located at the mid-point of the then-new Interstate 95, the Wilson Bridge also was the southernmost section of the 64-mile Capital Beltway, which was completed in 1964. The first link between Washington’s Virginia and Maryland suburbs, the fairly lightweight Wilson Bridge was not anticipated to become a major commuter route for local residents and I-95 was planned to be routed through the District of Columbia. By 1969, the Wilson Bridge started carrying more than its design capacity of 75,000 vehicles; by 1988, it was carrying twice the load. In 1975, plans to run I-95 through Washington were abandoned, leaving the Wilson Bridge to carry the load impertuity. By the mid-1980s the critical need for a larger and more substantial crossing was clear. After more than a decade of planning and design – complemented by equal measures of legal, legislative and political maneuvering – construction of the replacement bridge began in 2000.

The late 1950s and early 1960s were the hey-day of bridge building in the Washington, DC region. In fact, no additional portions of the Potomac River have been crossed by a new highway bridge since 1962 when the American Legion Bridge and a second span of the 14^th Street Bridge were added (a third span of the 14^th Street Bridge opened in 1971) – despite the region more than doubling in population and near-tripling in employment over the succeeding 44 years.