O
n Wednesday, a small crew from Unruh House Moving lifted a 50,000-lb. iron bridge from a gravel lot bordering the south banks of Elm Creek in Iola and set it, by some combination of exertion and finesse, over a ravine on the main section of the Lehigh Portland Trails.
In establishing this essential link in the county’s most ambitious network of recreational trails, the movers were completing a job they’d started two years earlier.
In May 2014, the same four-man crew, by request of Thrive Allen County, transported the 63-foot bridge from its original home three miles west of Humboldt to the creek-side lot in Iola, where it has remained for two years.
Only weeks prior to that move, Thrive, on the strength of a $100,000 grant from the Kansas Health Foundation, had managed to rescue the century-old bridge — which the county had deemed inadequate for vehicle traffic — from certain demolition, with the intention, someday, of inserting the historic bridge into the plot of a future trail.
But at that point the banks of Elm Creek and the land encircling the old Lehigh Portland cement quarry — now Elks Lake — was a dense, mostly impassable, crosshatch of trees and bramble.
And so for two years the bridge rested in the lot while volunteers worked to clear a path along the south side of Elm Creek. Of the volunteers, explained Thrive’s executive director David Toland, few approached the task with the same dedication or know-how as Dave Fontaine, David Riebel, Randy Rasa and Don Burns.
The land encompassing the Lehigh trails is owned by Iola Industries, who, noted Toland, recognized in the trails a tourism opportunity for Iola and for Allen County and a recreational asset with the potential “to help retain the residents we have but also attract new residents.”
And so, after a two-year wait, on Wednesday, the movers loaded the bridge — now donning a fresh jacket of red paint — onto four 15-ton-rated rollers and, with the attention of Fontaine, Rasa, Riebel, Toland and Burns bearing down on their efforts, they inched the bridge across a pair of beams until it spanned the fissure overlooking a wide, swirling section of Elm Creek.
The final stage in bridge preparation, according to Fontaine, involves creating the fill-and-limestone approaches on each end of the bridge, laying down a wood decking on its surface and adding additional railing to the sides — at which point the bridge will be fit to meet the generations of hikers, bikers and runners who make their own claims on the Lehigh trails.
