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Key Facts |
Bridge Name | Type | Road | Location | City | Crossing |
| Utz Road Bridge | Unknown | Utz Road | Preble County, OH | Rural | Rapes Run |
No, this is not a gag bridge! It was built in 1887, although it did get made fun of during my southwestern Ohio trip, earning such nicknames as "Redneck Bridge." It is not a very visually appealing bridge to be sure. As small as it is, it is a very unusual design, and is according to inventory entries, a Sherman Patent. James Stewart helped me out by providing me with copies of the actual patent itself, which includes both a drawing of the design and a discussion of it as well. As shown in the patent, the full name of the person was Evrett S. Sherman, and he lived in Galena, Ohio at the time.
The Utz Road Bridge was listed as a truss bridge on the inventory, but I refuse to put this in my truss bridge table. This bridge design is essentially a stringer bridge with diagonal tension rods added for additional support. It has more properties in common with a cable-stayed bridge or a beam bridge than a truss bridge, in my opinion.
I believe this bridge has been modified a bit. First, I will discuss the steel/iron portions of the bridge, which I believe are original, because there are Jones and Laughlin stamps on the beams. There are steel i-beams extending from abutment to abutment, just like a steel stringer bridge. There is a single floor beam under the stringers at the center of the span. This beam is attached to rods that extend from the floorbeam up to vertical i-beams sunk into the abutments. You might think of the way the floor beam is holding up the stringers as you might think of a cable-stayed bridge to hold the deck up. These rods would be experiencing tension forces, in technical words. The reason a bridge might be designed like this is to eliminate the need to purchase larger beams that might be required if a simple steel stringer bridge were erected here. The Sherman Patent was probably a design that never really was successful and never widely marketed.
Now on to the things I am not sure are original. Extending horizontally from the top of each vertical i-beam at the abutments is a wooden beam, that appears to have recently been covered with galvanized sheet metal. Another part I am certain is not original is on the north side of the bridge, an additional wooden beam extends from the horizontal beam down to the floor beam. I am unsure why this was done to that one side. According to the Sherman Patent, this beam is supposed to be there, so technically the side that doesn't have this beam is incorrect. James Stewart suggested that this bridge might be originally a basic stringer bridge that was retrofitted with the Sherman Patent design. Given these complications, I would say that was a decent theory.
