Nine years later the bridge was gone, destroyed by a flood that put downtown Springfield under four feet of water.
To build the current double span over the Willamette between Springfield and Glenwood would take 84 years, and involve five projects and four construction companies.
From the time the wagons rolled across the original wood bridge to today, when 27,000 cars cross the bridge each day, there is a lively history involving multiple designs and pots of public and private money.
Way back when, the only way to cross the river between Springfield and Glenwood was via a ferry run by early settlers Elias and Mary Briggs and their family. The ferry operated near where the Union Pacific railroad bridge now stands.
The first bridge, built in 1874, was constructed entirely of wood. A covered bridge, it was built with what were known as “Smith trusses,” invented just seven years earlier by Robert W. Smith of Tippecanoe, Ohio, and considered stronger and safer than any other bridge designs then in use.
“Truss” refers to the strengthening of a framework by using the rigidity of the triangle.
“The Smith truss inspires trust,” a newspaper commentator asserted in the Lane County Historian.
The contract to build the bridge was awarded to Albert Stuart Miller, also of Ohio, who had purchased the rights to construct Smith truss bridges in both Oregon and the Washington Territory. A.S. Miller & Sons relocated to Springfield in May 1874, and by Sept. 10 it had completed the bridge. The cost was $5,300.
For the next seven years, wagons, stock and pedestrians used the bridge daily. Then came the flood of 1881, though it wasn’t the raging waters that felled the bridge. A large tree caught in the current struck one of the wooden supports. The bridge “just dropped into the swirling, muddy water and floated off downstream,” an eyewitness reported.
Anyone crossing the bridge at the time would have endured a dramatic, four-mile float downstream before the bridge came to rest. Fortunately, the bridge was not in use when the tree took out the support.
Miller was hired a second time, and once again the chosen design was a covered bridge made entirely of wood. This time, however, the cost was a whopping $14,275 and the result was a landmark.
“The Springfield Bridge is an immense structure towering as high as the trees around it,” crowed the local paper. “When it receives its roof it will be visible from a great distance on either side of the river.”
The paper went on to make the confident prediction that only a second deluge or the end of the world would take out this bridge. When it was destroyed within the decade by yet another flood, the disaster spelled the end of wooden bridges and of Miller’s involvement.
Springfield awarded the next contract to the Pacific Bridge Company of Portland. This third attempt resulted in an all steel, single span bridge for a cost of $40,000. The steel bridge did not succumb to a flood, but was instead demolished in 1910 to make way for the bridge that remains in use to this day.
Designed by architect J.R. Ford, the bridge was built by Lord Nelson Roney, who had started his career as a bridge carpenter in 1875 working for A.S. Miller & Sons. The 1881 flood, which destroyed many bridges around the state, gave Roney the opportunity to branch out on his own for what turned into a 50-year career of Oregon bridge construction.
The new Springfield bridge took 120 working days to build, cost $30,000, and employed a design calling for three 200-foot trusses supported on concrete piers. This bridge spanned more than the river — it carried the thirsty from “dry” Eugene to the saloons of Springfield by electric streetcar.
The streetcar ceased operation in the mid-1920s. In 1929, the bridge was converted to automobile use, which continues to this day. A companion bridge, built to handle the increasing flow of city traffic, was completed in 1958. The bridges now carry more than 12,900 cars a day heading west, and 14,100 a day traveling east.
Ongoing maintenance is now the major expense for the Springfield bridges, but the most costly problem is no longer the wild water that flows beneath them — it may be the homeless people who sleep under them.
Over the past decade, the state has spent roughly $100,000 on cleaning up the camps of transients who seek shelter below the bridges.
“It’s public land and we can’t go in and kick them off, but there is a no camping ordinance, so we clean up whatever has been left,” said Joe Harwood of the Oregon Department of Transportation. Rather than continue to clean out the camps every three months, the department hopes to get the necessary permits to “cage in” the spaces between the underside of the bridges and the riverbanks by June.
Though it was a truss bridge that collapsed in Minnesota last summer, the Springfield bridges are not considered at risk. The first Springfield bridge lasted for seven years, the second a mere nine years, but the original span of the current bridge has been standing strong for just two years short of a century.