Answer Man: St. James bridge headed to golf course

Editor’s note: Answer Man offers answers to questions submitted by readers about people, places and things in the Marion area. To submit questions, email jjarvis@marionstar.com, call 740-375-5154, send a Facebook message or contact him via Twitter @jmwjarvis.

Question: Where will the steel bridge that’s being replaced with a covered wooden bridge on St. James Road end up?

Answer: “We don’t really know where it’s going to end up permanently,” said Marden Watts, administrative deputy with the Marion County engineer’s office.

But where the bridge will go after it’s disassembled in the meantime is King’s Mill Golf Course, said Steve S. Zachrich, of R.G. Zachrich Construction of Defiance, the contractor doing the $3.2 million bridge replacement project.

Phil Wright, Marion County’s deputy engineer, said to be able to remove the steel bridge so it can be replaced with the wooden bridge, the county “had to have somebody agree to accept the structure with the intention at some point of re-erecting it. Now, there’s no time line put on them or anything like that. Once it goes into private hands, they own it.”

“For us and the progression of the project, it was important for us to find a place for it, and again, like I said, not everybody is needing a 190-foot-long bridge,” Wright said.

The Ohio Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration, according to a letter from ODOT’s Office of Environmental Services dated Jan. 31, 2014, determined “that in order to fix the current geometric constraints at the T-intersection with Whetstone River Road, a plan to relocate and preserve the historic truss at the adjacent (King’s Mill Golf Course) grounds was incorporated into the project.”

ODOT District 6 spokeswoman Nancy Burton said: “Structures that are listed or eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, and part of a federal action (funding or permit), we are required to ‘market’ the historic truss bridge for adaptive reuse. We were lucky in that District 6 found an interested new owner right next door to the project.”

John Russell, of King’s Mill Golf Course, in a letter dated Sept. 26, 2011, consented “to salvage, store and maintain the historic truss bridge carrying County Road 141-E (St. James) over the Olentangy River in Richland Township, in Marion County. The structure is intended to be re-erected at a later date, at a location to be determined.”

The steel bridge is a circa-1905 pin-connected Parker thru truss bridge that is one of the two oldest examples of the Parker or Camelback design in Ohio.

An ODOT historic bridge survey report states: “It is technologically significant as one of Ohio’s most complete, surviving examples of a sloped-chord, long-span, pin-connected highway truss bridge with typical period detailing. ... Although the truss bridge is dated 1937 by a plaque, the bridge’s steel truss superstructure actually dates (circa) 1900 by style, design of its members, pin connections, and its 16-foot deck width.” County records state the bridge was relocated to St. James Road from Ohio 4 (Marion-Marysville Road) over the Scioto River in 1937.

Marion-Marysville Road was taken into the state highway system as Ohio 115 about 1911 and renamed Ohio 4 about 1921. County highway maps from 1914 and 1919 show a bridge spanning the Scioto River at that site. The truss bridge probably originally was a county bridge before being taken into the state system in 1911. It was returned to county ownership when it was relocated in 1937.

“The salvage and relocation of old truss bridges was (and still is) a common practice, and this portability was one of the ‘selling points’ of the technology,” the report states. “The original date of construction and fabricator are not noted by available records.”