By GEORGE ROGERS
of The Gazette
The Clark Street bridge, due to be demolished early next year and then replaced, has linked Stevens Point's east and west sides for nearly three quarters of a century.
Next spring and summer, while a new bridge is being built, people will be inconvenienced. But it was more than an inconvenience when a previous bridge burned in 1923. No other span crossed the Wisconsin River in Portage County, so the west side was briefly isolated from the rest of the community. The city quickly got a ferry into operation, and then a temporary bridge was erected.
Today Stevens Point has a second bridge, the one recently opened at County Highway HH. It will be a roundabout river crossing for west siders, but it'll beat a ferry ride or a rickety temporary bridge.
Ferries are what pioneer residents of Stevens Point relied on to cross the river. The first one, according to Malcolm Rosholt's history of Portage County, was Valentine Brown's. It began operating from the foot of Main Street in 1853, five years before the city was incorporated.
Rates were five cents for a foot passenger and 50 cents for a wagon drawn by one span of horses or one yoke of oxen.
Traffic must not have been heavy because hardly anyone lived west of the river, it seems there was no real settlement there until the 1870s, Rosholt wrote.
The ferry operated until the first bridge was built in 1867. Rosholt said it was wooden, and a bird's-eye view drawing of the city made in 1874 appears to show it resting on stone piers. A map of the city dated 1877 shows no bridge. It may be accurate, because the city was without a bridge at about that time. The first bridge had been destroyed by a tornado and starting in 1877 it was replaced by one constructed by the Milwaukee Bridge & Iron Works. It, too, was on stone piers.
This one stood until Memorial Day, May 30, 1923. Although it was an iron structure, it had a wooden deck. It was always catching fire but the city's Fire Department repeatedly saved it until that fateful day. Then someone dropped a match, a cigar or a cigarette and the deck ignited.
The fire spread rapidly and the bridge was ruined, two of its six spans falling into the river. Firemen tried to fight the blaze from boats, but the water pressure in the hoses forced their boats backward, away from the fire.
The Stevens Point Journal called the fire the most costly in the city's history, giving an estimate of $200,000 for replacement of the bridge.
Bridges can't be built overnight, but something had to be done for the people on the west side. The city chartered two launches for transporting passengers and then rebuilt a big scow into a ferry, fitting it out with a gasoline engine.
One of the first loads carried to the west side was ice from the Reading & Neuman icehouse, which stood on the east bank near the bridge and barely escaped burning, in those days no one had refrigerators and ice was all they had to preserve food.
Barney Schroder, who worked for the city Street Department for many years and retired as assistant superintendent, was a ferry operator during this time. Then came the temporary bridge, which served until construction of today's concrete bridge. Debated for a time was the question of whether the bridge should be at Clark Street or Main Street, but Clark won out, to the applause of merchants on the street. Clark was where the first two bridges stood.
It took more than two and one-half years to build the bridge and it wasn't opened until Jan. 1, 1926. The first to drive across in a car were Mayor John N. Welsby and F.F. Mengel, division engineer for the state Highway Department. But Ed Przybylski of Eau Pleine, who had worked on the bridge, said he had crossed it a few days earlier with a team of horses.
The loss of the bridge in the 1923 fire was less of an inconvenience to inter-city travelers than it would be today, because cars weren't that common and most long-distance trips were by train. Still, the bridge carried Highway 18 traffic. Today it's the route of Highway 10, and the only reminder of Highway 18 is a city street and town road called "Old 18" which branches off 10 on Stevens Point's east side.
Loads were restricted to seven tons when the bridge went into use in
1926, perhaps to see if the concrete structure was as sturdy as it looked. Mengel was quoted as saying he'd remove the limit later "and he won't care how heavy the load - the bridge is guaranteed to stand it."
Incidentally, the $200,000 cost estimate for replacing the bridge turned out a little high. The final figure was $160,000, much of it covered by the state.
The state is contributing heavily to the new Clark Street bridge, too.
The project covers more than the bridge itself, taking in reconstruction on the Highway 10 route from W. Wilson to Division Street. The low bid from Lunda Construction of Black River Fails was $9,239,465.
Figuring the cost split is a little complicated, since the city is paying 100 percent of things like sewer mains, water mains and parking lanes, 25 percent of street lights and landscaping, and virtually none of other expenses. Jon Van Alstine, the city's director of public works, said it works out to about 80 percent state and 20 percent city.
Demolition of the existing bridge is to begin March 1, 2000.
Construction on the new bridge should begin three or four weeks later, depending on how the river behaves during the spring breakup.
Construction moves faster than it did in the 1920s, and the bridge is to be open for unrestricted traffic by Sept. 29, 2000, seven months after the start of demolition on the old one. Work on the rest of the project is to be finished by Nov. 16, 2000.