When we began asking people to write to the commissioners, a good many of them sent a copy of their letter to the committee as well. Some came typed, some came on lined tablet paper, and one came on the back of a feed store calendar. Every one of them has been read aloud at a committee meeting, and several of us cried, which I record as a fact and not a complaint. These are shared here with the writers' kind permission. If you have a memory of the bridge, please send it to me and I will add it.

N.W.

I was born in April of 1913, three weeks after the big flood, so I have heard about the water coming up to the floor of the Bethel Ford bridge all my life. My mother told it every spring when the creek rose. She said my father went down in the rain to see if the bridge was gone and came back and said, "She held," and sat down at the table and cried, and she had never seen him cry before.

When I was small we went to church across that bridge every Sunday in the buggy. Our mare, Dolly, would not go into it. She did not like the dark or the hollow sound. So every Sunday Papa got down and took off his coat and put it over her eyes and led her through, and every Sunday we were late. I am 86 years old and I can still hear her shoes on those boards.

Hazel Kaminsky

In February of 1943 I walked down to the bridge the night before I left for the Army. I was nineteen. I stood in the middle of it a long time and listened to the creek under the ice, and I told myself that if I got home, the first thing I would do was walk across it again. I got home in December of 1945, and that is what I did, before I even went in the house to see my mother. My wife says I am sentimental about the bridge. That is right.

Wilson Hayden

Every boy in this end of the county learned to swim in the hole below the Bethel Ford bridge, and most of us learned on the rope that hung from the big sycamore on the south bank. You swung out over the deep water and let go at the top and hoped. In the summer of 1938 my cousin and I climbed up on the outside of the bridge and jumped off the downstream side, which our mothers had told us never to do. The water was deep enough. The whipping we got that night was deeper. There was a snapping turtle in that hole as big as a washtub that we called the Deacon. I expect his grandson is still there.

Luther Butcher

Our school bus crossed the Bethel Ford bridge twice a day for eight years, and every single time the driver stopped in the middle and honked the horn, because it made such a racket in there that all the children screamed with joy. I don't know who started it. I don't think the county knew about it. When I was married at the Bethel church in 1957, our pictures were taken in the north portal of the bridge, me in my mother's dress and my husband in his only suit. Every bride from the church for forty years has had her picture taken in that portal. Where are they supposed to go now?

Sandra Dickens

I was baptized in Deer Lick Creek in the pool below the bridge on a Sunday afternoon in August of 1959, when I was twelve. The pastor and I waded out to where the water was up to my waist, and the whole congregation stood up on the bridge and along the bank and sang. I remember how cold the water was and how the singing sounded, coming down out of the bridge, like it was coming out of a big wooden bell. The Bethel church still baptizes in that pool. My own grandson is to be baptized there next summer. I would like the bridge to be standing over him when he is.

Judith Roscoe

I'm not proud of it, but in 1967 I carved my initials and a girl's initials in the third siding board from the south end on the upstream side, with a heart around them. They're still there. So is she: we've been married twenty-eight years. I also learned to drive a stick shift on that bridge, because my father said if I could stop and start on the hump of the floor in the middle without rolling back, I could drive anywhere. Tear it down and you're tearing out a piece of everybody I grew up with.

Randal Baugher

I was in Mrs. Webster's fourth grade class in 1972, and in the spring she walked us all the way from the school to the Bethel Ford bridge to measure it. We paced it off, and then we measured it with her husband's fifty-foot tape, and then we went back to the classroom and figured out why our paces didn't come out to the same number as the tape. That was how I learned what an average was. I still remember that it's 120 feet.

In 1981 my prom date and I had our picture made in the portal, me in a pink dress with ruffles that I would rather not discuss. My daughter is fourteen now. I want her to have her prom picture made in the same place, even if she rolls her eyes at me. Please save the bridge.

Teri McCartney, now of Indianapolis