MECHANIC FALLS — When the state next year finishes overhauling Bridge #2540, which carries Elm Street across the Little Androscoggin River, it will rename the span for an adventurer who vanished four decades ago while trying to cross the Pacific Ocean in a tiny sailboat.

The idea of dedicating the bridge for Bill Dunlop, a former Mechanic Falls resident, arose two years ago at a Mechanic Falls Historical Society gathering.

Its president, Eriks Petersons, reached out to politicians and the state Department of Transportation and within a few months a bill existed in the Legislature to give the bridge a name.

State Sen. Rick Bennett, an Oxford Republican, told colleagues that tales of Dunlop’s “trips and adventures in a boat a little larger than a bathtub are legendary,” including his 1982 crossing of the Atlantic Ocean.

The 43-year-old Dunlop disappeared in the South Pacific in the summer of 1984 somewhere between the Cook Islands and Australia, a long voyage through remote waters.

Lawmakers, who weren’t exactly itching for a fight over naming a bridge, unanimously backed the idea and on April 2, Gov. Janet Mills signed the measure into law — just six months after anyone thought of doing it — and proved government doesn’t always move at a glacial pace.

Construction on the bridge is slated to start in the spring of 2025 and be completed in the autumn.

When the work is done, officials said, there will be a dedication ceremony to rename it after Dunlop, a man who spanned the oceans and loved the water.

“This has been a lifelong dream of mine,” the sailor’s only child, Kim Dunlop Davis, said last year.

She said because her father’s body was never recovered, the bridge will provide a place of remembrance. Davis said it is fitting that it will be beside flowing water.