DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll give you every word it's worth. Now, Texas used to be lousy with pin-connected truss bridges — those elegant iron skeletons strung across creeks and rivers all over the countryside, practically a trademark of rural life out here. Most of them are gone.
But this one, this particular bridge, has been playing a long game of survival that would make a riverboat gambler tip his hat. This is a Pratt truss bridge, pin-connected, the very style that once dotted rural Texas like freckles on a redhead. And it holds a distinction that sets it apart from every other bridge left standing in the state: it is the last one in Texas built by the Clinton Bridge and Iron Company — out of Iowa, of all places.
The last one. Every other Clinton bridge Texas ever had is gone, and this is what remains. It opened in 1891, way out on the Leon River in Coryell County, in what would eventually become Mother Neff State Park.
Eighteen-ninety-one. That bridge watched decades roll by. Then, sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s — the records aren't precise, and sometimes history is like that — it got picked up and moved about six miles to County Road 322.
Still working. Still holding. But by 1993, it just couldn't carry modern road traffic anymore.
Now, a lesser bridge might've met the wrecker's ball right there. Instead, the Texas Department of Transportation struck a historic preservation agreement with the Texas Historical Commission, and they painstakingly transported this thing more than a hundred and fifty miles to bring it to this very site. A hundred and fifty miles.
An 1891 iron bridge, riding across Texas one more time. The last of its kind. Still here.
What the marker says
A pin connected truss bridge characteristic of the popular style that once dotted rural Texas, this bridge is the last one in Texas built by the Clinton Bridge and Iron Company of Iowa. Originally opened in 1891 on the Leon River in Coryell County in what later became Mother Neff State Park, the bridge was moved 6 miles in the late 1940s or early 1950s to County Road 322. By 1993 the bridge could no longer support modern road traffic. Texas Department of Transportation officials, in a historic preservation agreement with the Texas Historical Commission, painstakingly transported it more than 150 miles to this site. (1998)