I was on a mission recently to see if there are any remnants of the old Sperry Bridge still in existence. My mission was two-fold; I also wanted a bit of exercise, so I pulled into the Sugar Creek Nature Park after work and changed my shoes before joining my husband. We hiked along the trail for a short while before straying off to stick close to the creek just before the circa 1928 bridge over Lafayette Road. I scanned both the north and south banks of the creek but, due to the brush and bracken, I could not see any sign of a bridge foundation that looked similar to a concrete set of stairs. Previously, the only picture I could find showing the Sperry Bridge next to the newer bridge before it was torn down in 1928 was in Dick Munro’s excellent Sugar Creek reference book, Paddling Sugar Creek from the Source to the Wabash (RL 977.24 Mun). Someone out there probably knows where or if remains of the bridge foundation exist, but we couldn’t find it.
My interest in the location of the Sperry Bridge sharpened after I came across an article from an 1894 issue of the Crawfordsville Daily Journal about a bunch of saloons that sat just north of the bridge. Winfield Scott Cox, a native of Kentucky who arrived in Crawfordsville in the 1870s, owned one of these saloons, called Last Chance. According to an 1892 article, the saloon was a two-story frame building in operation for more than 50 years and had been a distillery at one time. (Incidentally, Winfield’s brother Tuck Cox was also in the saloon business. He owned The Crystal Palace in Lafayette.) Last Chance was considered the least seedy establishment of the bunch, but as a whole, apparently, this stretch of saloons in Sperry Valley was considered the “wild side” of Crawfordsville. The Crawfordsville Weekly Journal reported, “respectable people fear to drive along that part of the road from the bridge to the Last Chance by night and avoid the place so far as possible by day.” More specifically, the newspaper reported, “At night, bad men and worse women frequent the place drinking at the saloon and racing up and down the road in a shameful manner.” Furthermore, many of the saloons often violated strict Sunday laws and lost their licenses, yet they still opened for business. Fellow saloon owners who did follow the rules formed the Saloon Keepers Union in Crawfordsville and were much disgusted by these violations, especially when they fired up local temperance crusaders.
I am not sure why I find such a description of the “wild side” of Crawfordsville so fascinating. Perhaps it is because I am envisioning it as our own version of Lawless, a movie about three bootlegging brothers in Virginia. The movie is based on a true story written by Matt Bondurant entitled The Wettest County in the World (available as an e-audiobook on the Libby app), which is about his grandfather and two great-uncles in the 1930s. This crime drama aptly portrays the very real tension between alcohol smugglers and the law during Prohibition. On the other hand, perhaps my fascination stems from the names of the saloons themselves. As well as I can ascertain from historic Crawfordsville newspapers via the free historic newspaper database Hoosier State Chronicles (www.https://newspapers.library.in.gov/), Cox’s name of Last Chance alluded to its location on the outskirts of Crawfordsville as one of the last places to buy a drink before traveling north to Lafayette. Another colorful name for a Crawfordsville saloon was the Dead Horse Saloon which operated out of the back of a bakery on Washington Street north of the courthouse in the 1850s. Some of the other less colorful names of saloons in Crawfordsville were the Buckeye Saloon, the Florence, the Clipper Saloon, the Charter Oak Saloon, the Green Street Saloon, the West End Saloon, and another favorite, the Health Office Saloon specializing in liquors, brandies, wine, beers, and cigars to aid was ills you. I do admire the marketing genius of the “Health Office” owner, Gus Karle, for that one.
Amie Boone-Cox is a local historian who loves digging into the archives at the Crawfordsville District Public Library.
