Pictured in the images above is the Yountsville Bridge as it was in place and then in the midst of removal which give a good look at the wooden skeleton. Photos are from the Ramsay Archives at Wabash College. Below is the book cover.
The Deer’s Mill Bridge from the south. Image from the Covered Bridges on the Byways of Indiana.
One great delight in my work here as archivist at Wabash College is the access that I have to maps, books and documents from the past. One particularly interesting book from 1949 is “Covered Bridges on the Byways of Indiana” by Bryan E. Ketcham. Our copy, #100, is a first edition of the first printing, signed by the author and presented as a gift to Eli Lilly who donated it to our library. It is a snapshot of Indiana’s covered bridges and is full of incredible detail.
The author, along with his wife Mabel, set out to capture everything that might be known about these lovely relics of the past. Each entry carries a large picture followed by the bridge name, the waterway it spans and a location. There follows the date of construction, the builder, its length, width and height. Ketcham lists the type of roof, information on the abutments, whether a single or a double span, and the load limits. The type of construction — Burr Arch, Howe Truss or one of several other types was important to those interested in the subject. The specifications end with the date and time the bridge was photographed. Just below that there is a short essay about the location, a bit of history of the bridge and a few author’s notes. At 216 pages it is a comprehensive look at the covered bridges of our state at a time when the bulk of them were still in use. I thought we might look at the information for three bridges over Sugar Creek.
Perhaps our most well-known covered bridge is the one at Deer’s Mill. Its listing says that it was built in 1878 by J. J. Daniels and is 275 feet long and 16 feet wide. It was built with two spans on cut stone abutments and a pier. Deer’s Mill was a trading hub in the area and with the fast flowing creek the mills here were always well supplied with water power. Another great old book full of useful history is Sugar Creek Saga by Theodore Gronert. In it, Gronert says that typically the first businesses in an area were mills for grinding corn or wheat. Often settlers would bring a mill stone from the East to start their business upon arrival. Gronert also notes that in return for grinding a farmer’s harvest, mill owners would receive up to one fourth of the grain as payment.
The Darlington bridge was funded by the town. The people of the area wanted a safe way to cross the creek in any weather. The settlers of Darlington raised money, $1,585 in all, and in mid-April of 1866 they passed it along to the county to build them a safe “all-weather” crossing. The CBBI says that this bridge was built by Joseph Kress using the Howe Truss method — length of 166 feet, width of 17 feet and height of 13 feet. It has a shingle roof, and its foundation uses cut stone abutments and a pier.
Happily, the first two bridges still stand over Sugar Creek today. But the biggest and the best covered bridge was the one that spanned the creek at Yountsville, just upstream from our current bridge. Built in 1854 by Henry Wolf using the Burr Arch construction method, it had two lanes and was 160 feet long. This bridge provided a vital link to Crawfordsville from the west, and was especially helpful to the woolen mill at Yountsville. While the old bridge was lower than today’s, it was still 40 feet above the water, making it the highest covered bridge in the state.
These two books, which are great resources, may be found on the website ABEBOOKS.com. The Covered Bridges on the Byways of Indiana starts at $38 and the Sugar Creek Saga by Theodore Gronert, former Wabash history professor, can usually be found at any local antique store. The history of our area is rich with stories of folks who, through hard work, perseverance and a little luck, built this area into the place we now call home, enriched as we have always been by our river, humbly named Sugar Creek.
Beth Swift is an archivist at Wabash College.
