Marion Center Road Bridge

Visit Historic Bridges of the Midwest's Page For This Historic Bridge

This Bridge Has Been Restored!

Most Recent Visit: April 2, 2006

This is what needs to be done with the Bostick Road Bridge! This bridge was completely restored, and repainted, and continues to serve vehicular traffic in its original location. This is the sort of restoration story I like to see, where a bridge stays where it was meant to be, and carries the type of traffic it was built to carry, that of vehicles. Although, granted, the target vehicle type when this was built was likely horse-drawn! Allen County deserves to be thanked for saving this invaluable historic landmark for future generations! Despite there being more Whipple trusses in Allen County (as of early 2006) than are in the whole of the state of Michigan, Whipple trusses are a less common, and significant structure type. As a skewed structure (20% skew) the bridge is even more significant.

I wonder if perhaps this pin connected Whipple truss bridge might have been built by the prolific Wrought Iron Bridge Company of Canton, Ohio. They built a number of Whipple trusses, also known as double-intersection Pratt truss bridges. Some of their bridges lacked v-lacing like on Maple Road in Ann Arbor, MI, and others had the unusual termination of the top chord to the end-post like Oakwood Avenue Bridge. This bridge's fresh red paint, skew, and unusual lattice portal bracing all remind me of the Gale Road Bridge in Michigan also. I noted however that the Gale Road Bridge, a sizable Michigan bridge, looks like a dwarf next to this bridge!

This bridge features unusual turnbuckles that are only threaded at one end. While there may be other bridges that feature this, I had never seen it before!

I usually take issue with railings on a bridge when a restoration, and while I actually would rather see the Armco guardrails that were put on this bridge over the ugly wood or cyclone fence railings that end up on pedestrian bridges, I have issue with how they were mounted. They were bolted directly to the vertical members, which is a foolish way to mount them. I am no engineer, but I can tell that railings should always be connected to the floor beams of the bridge, so that impact damage transfers to a lengthwise pull on the floor beams, which really wouldn't harm anything. As they are, if a car hits the railings, the impact pressure will transfer to the vertical members, bending them, and possibly compromising the integrity of the structure. This is what happened to the Frith Road Bridge in Michigan.