Dear Friends,

My name is Nellie Webster. I taught fourth grade in this county for thirty-four years, and I am the secretary of the Committee to Save the Bethel Ford Covered Bridge, which a group of us formed in May, around my kitchen table, with a pot of coffee and a great deal of indignation.

I have a personal interest, and I may as well confess it. On a rainy Sunday evening in June of 1955, Henry Webster stopped his father's pickup truck in the middle of the Bethel Ford bridge, turned off the engine, listened to the rain on the roof for a while, and asked me to marry him. Henry says he picked the bridge because it was the only dry place in the county. We have been married forty-four years, and I have never let him forget it.

But this page is not about Henry and me. It is about a bridge that has carried this county across Deer Lick Creek for 116 years, and that will be torn down next year unless enough of us say no. Please read on. There will not be a test, but I hope you will remember the material.

The Bethel Ford bridge was built in 1883 by Wiley Huie, who built a good many of this county's bridges in those years, to replace the old ford below the Bethel church, where wagons crossed when the creek was low and waited, sometimes for days, when it was not. It is a single span of 120 feet, a Burr arch truss, set on cut sandstone abutments, with a red board siding, a tin roof and a white portal at each end.

In March of 1913, when the great flood took out bridges all over Indiana and Ohio, the water came up to the floor of the Bethel Ford bridge and carried a barn roof against the upstream side. The bridge held. Two other bridges on Deer Lick Creek did not.

Below the bridge, on the downstream side, the creek makes a deep green pool that has been the swimming hole for every child in this end of the county for as long as anyone can remember. The Bethel church has baptized its new members in that pool since before the bridge was built. And on the bridge itself, in the half-dark, where the boards rumble under the tires and the rain drums on the roof, generations of young people have done their courting. I will say no more about that. Several of the letters on our Memories page say quite a bit more.

In April of this year a state inspection found serious rot in the lower chords, the long timbers that run along the bottom of each side, at the south end, where a gutter on the roof had been leaking for years. The county closed the bridge to cars and trucks the next day. It is still open to people on foot, and that is how we would like to keep it.

The county's plan. The county commissioners intend to build a two-lane concrete bridge alongside the old one, on the upstream side, and then to tear the covered bridge down. The highway engineer, Mr. Gary Folsom, says the old bridge cannot carry modern school buses and farm equipment, which is true, and that the county cannot afford to keep up a bridge that no longer carries traffic, and is afraid of what happens if someone is hurt on it. We understand those concerns. We have heard them at three meetings now.

Our plan. We are not against the new bridge. The school buses have been driving eleven miles around since April, and the children are spending too long on them. Build the new bridge. But leave the old one standing beside it, repaired, for people on foot and on bicycles, for the swimmers and the fishermen and the brides who want their picture taken in the portal. Replace the rotted chords, fix the roof, and turn the old bridge over to the committee, which will raise the money to keep it, as other towns in Indiana and Ohio have done with their old bridges.

Our vice chairman, Mr. Duane Leonardo, who restores old barns for a living and knows a mortise from a tenon, has crawled every inch of the bridge with a flashlight and an ice pick. He believes the arches and most of the frame are sound, and that the damage is confined to the south end. We are raising money now to hire a professional engineer who specializes in timber bridges to say so in writing.

In August we sent a nomination for the bridge to the state historic preservation office, asking that it be placed on the National Register of Historic Places, the nation's official list of buildings and places worth saving, which is kept by the National Park Service. Mrs. Dorothy Tallant spent most of the summer in the courthouse basement and the library finding the old commissioners' records, the 1883 contract and Mr. Huie's bill, and she photographed every corner of the bridge. The nomination is forty-one pages long. I typed it.

I want to be honest with you, as I always was with my students: being on the Register would not, all by itself, stop the county from tearing the bridge down. But it would tell everyone, in black and white, that this bridge matters, and it would open the door to help for its repair that is not open now.

The county commissioners, Mr. John Stokes, Mr. Kent Wood and Mrs. Alma Rico, meet the first Monday of each month at 9:00 in the morning in the courthouse. The public may speak at the beginning of every meeting. Please come, and please wear something red, so they can count us.

• Monday, October 4. Mr. Folsom is to present the plans for the new bridge. This is the important one.
• Monday, November 1. We have asked to be on the agenda to present our plan.
• Monday, December 6. The commissioners expect to vote on the bid for the new bridge.

Be polite. Be brief. Say your name and how long you have lived in the county, and say what the bridge means to you. Commissioner Rico told me after the last meeting that the letters are being read. Keep writing them.