Letter to the Editor

County loses piece of history in Bowling Green bridge

Sunday, December 13, 2015

To the editor:

The subject of keeping the Bowling Green Bridge in Clay County was a waste of time for our County Commissioners and the people who attended the meeting on Dec. 7th.

The State, in the guise of its employees with the DNR and INDOT were not there to help Clay County retain that bridge for its historical value, indeed, they were there to ensure the commissioners had no choice but decline to accept ownership of the bridge. On the part of INDOT, this was apparent from the difference in the agreement offered to Brown County and the Clay County Commissioners... an absurd difference of only $132,000 between bringing the bridge to a standard in place and bringing it to the same standard elsewhere along with the cost of dismantling it so that it could be reassembled, trucking it fifty miles, building four new abutments for it to be erected upon, then erecting it. The representative from Parsons, the engineering firm that drew up the plans for the new bridge for INDOT, made both his company's and INDOT's reasoning perfectly plain when he stated that leaving the old bridge in place would raise the cost of the new one.

One of the INDOT representatives offered the excuse that the agreement written for Brown County had been the first one INDOT had written involving a bridge of historic significance owned by INDOT. She also stated that there would probably be revisions. There are bound to be as I heard mentioned that the cost of building the new abutments was going to be around $500,000 and the cost of moving the bridge may be just as high. That looks to be another million out of the pockets of Indiana taxpayers.

So Clay County loses a piece of history, Indiana and the Nation loses a piece of history.

Even worse than that, by separating the spans as is the plan along the Salt Creek Trail in Brown County and Brown County State Park, the historical value of the bridge will be destroyed. INDOT may as well use explosives to drop it in the river and recover the scrap to put in a museum somewhere. London, England does not miss the London Bridge that is now in Lake Havasu City, AZ., but if you ever get the chance to visit you will notice that it sure misses London and London's skyline. So it will be with the Bowling Green Bridge, it will miss the Eel River bottoms as you come down the hill headed west and it will miss the backdrop of the hills and trees as you cross the bottoms headed east. These things you cannot move but they are the frame that the bridge was built into and became as much a part of the bridge's history as the blood and sweat the Hoosiers poured into erecting it.

One last lesson we in the county can draw from this experience with the State of Indiana and the Bowling Green Bridge. That is that if we have anything else of historical value that is under state control we had better make our plans to keep it before the state plans to remove or destroy it.