State Line Bridge, which has attracted snags and mosquitoes but not traffic since 1999, is going to be picked up by a giant crane and lifted off the Kankakee River.
That could happen as early as next week, depending on the weather.
“We are here to celebrate 50 years of effort to remove this bridge,” Scott Pelath, executive director of the Kankakee River Basin and Yellow River Basin Development Commission, said Wednesday in a ceremony that served as a pre-death funeral for the bridge.
His eulogy for the bridge was to the point.
“It’s a beautiful bridge. It’s fascinating to look at; it has a history to it,” Pelath said, “but it sits about two feet above the Kankakee River, and it’s been closed to vehicular traffic since about 1999.”
“It grabs every bit of debris from a flood, and we can’t remove it when we have a flood going on because we have water here and water there,” he said. “It’s a direct impediment to the safe passage of floodwater.”
“That affects folks on the Indiana side, but it also affects folks on the Illinois side,” Pelath said.
“This structure is so antiquated, if we have another flood again, which I pray we don’t but we probably will at some point in the future, this bridge itself might wash into the state of Illinois, and then we have a real problem. Then there’s no historic preservation. There’s only salvage.”
“We’re removing it in a responsible way that’s going to allow us to possibly reconstruct it elsewhere in the future for the public’s enjoyment in a safe way,” he said.
The bones of the bridge will rest in the Lake County Highway Department garage until someone, someday, claims them free of charge and puts the skeleton of the bridge back together somewhere safe.
Removing the bridge is a $2.5 million project.
Project Manager Jordan Falls and Senior Superintendent Chris Creasbaum described the process.
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A giant crane, assembled by a smaller crane, is poised on a pile of stone and boards stretched across the marshland so the crane can get within grabbing distance of the bridge.
“Right now, it’s sitting on a marsh,” Falls said. “Where we stand, this was all water.” It will be restored to its original condition, minus the trees removed – new ones will be planted in their place – at the end of the project.
The bridge is going to be cut loose from its supports and rigging points, Creasbaum said, with the crane sitting 88 feet into the water. The big crane will lift the 224-foot-long bridge and set it on dry land, where it will be disassembled, piece by piece, and carefully labeled so it won’t be like buying an Erector set with no instructions at a garage sale when someone finally puts it back together.
The bridge is heavy, about 165,000 pounds without the deck, but the crane is heavier. On Thursday, there were 90,000 pounds of weights on each side of the crane.
It won’t be the first time the bridge was moved.
Tony Ferraro, Indiana Gov. Mike Braun’s emissary for northern Indiana, knows the bridge’s history from his nine years of work to get the bridge removed. It was moved to its current site in 1920, he said, from a previous location in Kankakee County.
The Indiana Department of Natural Resources has an inventory of historic bridges, including State Line Bridge. All counties issue a number to each bridge in the county. State Line Bridge, which spans the river between Lake and Newton counties, has a split personality. It’s Newton County Bridge 173 and Lake County Bridge 36.
It’s a Pennsylvania truss bridge, a rare creature in the wild. Distinctive panels have gone missing over the decades. Pieces are held together by large C clamps as the bridge prepares to slip into its twilight stage.
The National Park Service inventory of historic bridges tells the significance of the bridge. “The use of unusually light verticals and the absence of any sub-strut gives this truss a delicate appearance. The absence of adjustable diagonals or counters is also unusual for a pin-connected truss. The bridge retains its otherwise unadorned original members,” the inspection card reads.
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It was built around 1900 and originally stretched across the river just south of what is now Illinois Highway 17 near Sun River Terrace. About 20 years later, it was moved to its new location.
The problem with the bridge now is that it’s not only closed to traffic but also sits just two feet above the river. It floods easily, and it collects debris as the river flows from Indiana into Illinois beneath the bridge.
On Wednesday, a tree and branches held onto the bridge as if saying a final farewell.
The Kankakee River is a navigable waterway. It’s different in the two states it flows through. On the Indiana side, it was straightened a century ago and turned into a big ditch, essentially, through dredging. The Grand Kankakee Marsh was drained in the process.
“Illinois stopped them right here with long guns,” Toby Timmons, of Momence, said as he stood on the bridge and pointed to the meandering stretch of the river that flows into Illinois. Timmons lives near the south end of the bridge.
“It’s going to be weird,” he said, to no longer walk onto the bridge to go fishing.
Others have walked on the bridge, including some who built a campfire and burned a hole through the deck of the bridge. Plywood was laid over that spot with the word “hole” on the board the way “X” might mark the spot on a river pirate’s treasure map.
“It’s an exciting day for me. I grew up on the Kankakee River,” said State Rep. Jim Pressel, chair of the Indiana House Transportation Committee.
In 2016, when he joined the Indiana General Assembly, everything was frozen. Until it wasn’t. “My constituents in south county said you’ve got to come and see this floodwater,” he said. “It was bad. It was really, really bad. It was the worst I had ever seen.”
Then-Rep. Doug Gutwein, of Francesville, toured the area. “We’ve got to fix this. This just isn’t right,” he said.
That led to the creation of the Kankakee River Basin and Yellow River Basin Development Commission, which replaced the former Kankakee River Basin Development Commission. The Yellow River is a tributary, so what happens there affects the Kankakee watershed, too.
“I cringe every time we get a 10-inch rainfall or a 6-inch rainfall,” Pressel said, but with the work the commission has done to shore up levees and remove snags, the river has behaved itself.
The commission has become a model for others like it statewide, Pelath said.
Its chairman, John McNamara, served as St. Joseph County Surveyor for 50 years, the longest-serving county surveyor in Indiana history.
He and state Rep. Mike Aylesworth were members of the original commission, begun in 1977 or so. Now that this big task has been accomplished, something McNamara worked on for 50 years, he will be able to retire knowing the major work is done.
Aylesworth grew up in Aylesworth, Indiana, one of those tiny settlements that if you blink you might not know you were ever there. Since marrying his wife Dolores, he lives even closer to the river.
“I have so many stories of river floodings, it’s unbelievable,” he said.
He recounted the dredging that began in St. Joseph and LaPorte counties in 1872 and went downstream at two miles a year, with court battles along the way. “It took 40 years to get down here at the state line,” he said.
“People criticize us for wanting to drain the marsh,” but federal policy at the time wanted it drained for productive land. That didn’t change until the Clean Water Act was enacted in 1972.
Aylesworth doesn’t remember the year, somewhere in the early 1980s, but he remembers it was March 14 when his phone rang. A friend on the Jasper County side phoned and said the river’s running right over the top of the bank. “Come here and look,” he told Aylesworth, who was a Porter County commissioner then.
“I’ll be damned, he was right,” Aylesworth said. Along a 150-foot stretch, the river was flowing over the top of the bank.
When the thaw began that spring, “We got that big whoosh of water coming down and had to handle it,” he said. He called for a Jasper County commissioner to shore up the bank, but no one was available because the local basketball team was in the regionals. Aylesworth sent a friend with a bulldozer to stop the overflow.
Another time, the river’s offense was on U.S. 231 between Hebron and DeMotte. “All of a sudden, water, four inches deep, went right over the top of the road,” Aylesworth said.
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He called Harry Brown Trucking, saying he needed stone. How much? Just keep it coming, Aylesworth said.
“We piled a bunch of stone in the middle of the road,” he said, and called the Indiana Department of Transportation to close the road and send an engineer to look at it. He didn’t get a quick response. Finally, he told INDOT, “I’m piling stone in the middle of the road. And on top of that, you’re paying for it.” INDOT sprang into action and paid for the stone.
Standing near the bridge, he looked at it and said, “It’s time to take this puppy out and get it in a place where it can be stored for historic preservation.”
Indiana Department of Natural Resources Director Alan Morrison said he looks forward to the bridge being gone and Hoosiers and Illinoisans paddling back and forth between the two states. Just remember to buy a fishing license, he said, to not get into trouble with the conservation officers.
At the northwest foot of the bridge stands a house where a woman called Salty operated a small store. The pop machine is still there.
Todd Huntley, a retired Kankakee County sheriff’s deputy, remembers that place well. “You used to get a Pepsi for 25 cents,” he said. “She ran a bait shop out of there.”
“We always stopped and checked on them when the river was high,” Huntley said.
Jan Krizik and Craig Long, also retired Kankakee County deputies, stood on the bridge and told their own stories.
“I grew up downriver, about a mile,” Krizik said. “This was our boundary,” both as deputies and as a kid growing up. “I’ve spent many a summer day under the bridge.”
Long remembers the last time he drove across a bridge. It was in a 1988 Chevy Caprice. “I think we sat right back there and said, should we or shouldn’t we,” but they were backup on a police call. There were loose boards and no asphalt on the deck, he recalled.
Dolores Aylesworth wasn’t allowed to swim in the river. “It was so polluted,” she said, with people throwing trash in the river instead of having it hauled to a landfill. People drowned in the river, too.
The owners of Country Kitchen, a Hebron restaurant, stored a beautiful mahogany boat at her childhood home and used it on Sundays between lunch and dinner, she recalled.
Curt Ralston, wearing a “River Rat Bandits” T-shirt, volunteers with about a dozen others to clean up the river.
“That road has been washed out all the time,” he said, pointing to the south end of the bridge. He wouldn’t want to drive on it.
Water quality is important, he said, with Kankakee getting its drinking water from the namesake river. Don’t feed bread to ducks and fish, he said; it’s bad for the animals and the river alike. Corn would be a better substitute.
“It’s going to be weird,” not having the bridge in place, Timmons said. His land has around 300 feet of frontage on the river.
“They’ve got to dredge the river. We can’t even get our boats through anymore,” he said. Sand from the Yellow River flows along the Kankakee until it piles up in Illinois. The water under the bridge used to be 15 feet deep, he said, but on Wednesday as he stood on the bridge, he could see the bottom.
“Everybody wanted to see the bridge to say goodbye,” Ralston said.
“It’s sad. It’s like a death,” Ricardo Munguia, of Momence, said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.