Roseville Covered Bridge - Parke County, Indiana
by Susan Rissi Tregoning
Title
Roseville Covered Bridge - Parke County, Indiana
Artist
Susan Rissi Tregoning
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
The Roseville Covered Bridge in Parke County, Indiana, is one of 31 covered bridges in the county.
The 1910 Roseville Covered Bridge is a 263-foot long double-span Burr Arch truss bridge across the Big Raccoon Creek in Coxville.
J.J. Daniels built the previous Roseville Covered Bridge in 1865, but unfortunately, it was destroyed by arson in 1910. When Parke County began accepting bids for its replacement, they initially wanted to replace the bridge with a concrete one. J.P. Van Fossen was awarded the contract for a new covered bridge instead.
Eyewitnesses from the construction site in 1910 claimed that J.J. Daniels was the on-site foreman for the new bridge. If this is true, he would have been 84 years old when he built his second Roseville Covered Bridge.
Nothing can be substantiated, and whether or not Daniels was involved in constructing this bridge is a mystery. A photo taken when the bridge was almost completed shows a portal inscription giving J.P. Van Fossen credit as the contractor and J. Brooks is credited as the builder, but the onsite witnesses say Brooks never worked on the bridge. A later photograph shows a different inscription giving J.J. Daniels credit, but today, J.J. Daniels’s name is no longer there, and credit is given to Van Fossen.
Since the new bridge was a different length, new abutments had to be constructed. By 1900, most covered bridges had poured concrete abutments, and the Van Fossen brothers were known to have used concrete abutments on all their other bridges. Interestingly, the new abutments were constructed out of stone, in typical J.J. Daniels construction fashion. There is even a photograph commemorating the first stone for the 1910 bridge being loaded on the back of a horse-drawn wagon. So, if one of the Van Fossen had built this bridge, wouldn’t he have used concrete abutments here, too?
Copyright 2023 Susan Rissi Tregoning
Uploaded
January 7th, 2023
Statistics
Viewed 3,860 Times - Last Visitor from New York, NY on 03/28/2024 at 11:10 PM
Embed
Share
Sales Sheet