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By Tim Ruzek

Just before the iron-truss bridge, a pickup stopped in December 1952 to allow a bus to go through the narrow crossing over the Cedar River in Austin’s state park.

Another driver was less fortunate and collided with the pickup, damaging the vehicles.

Many accidents occurred at the Fox Drive bridge (today’s 4th Street Northeast on the Hormel Foods plant’s west side), including in the 1950s, for example, when numerous motorists were ticketed for careless driving after crashing into the bridge.

Local drivers knew they needed to maneuver through the bridge when passing through Horace Austin State Park. Back then, the river took a horseshoe-shaped bend toward the bridge before flowing into Austin Mill Pond until that stretch of river was filled in the early 1960s.

“You go north on Fox Drive, swing left a bit and cross the Cedar River bridge, being careful not to lock horns with opposing traffic,” the Austin Daily Herald wrote Oct. 28, 1959.

A trucker, who drove semi into Austin four to five days a week, shared his dislike in 1953 for the bridge.

“I don’t like to meet anyone on that bridge,” trucker Owen Siebring said. “And going north, I have to swing my truck clear into the middle of the bridge in order to clear it with the rear of my truck.”

The bridge’s narrow, 20-foot width was the reason Austin could get it in 1931 … and a big reason locals removed it 30 years later.

In 1931, the bridge – a crossing over the Root River’s north branch near Chatfield on what today is U.S. Hwy. 52 – was “being dismantled to make room for a new and wider structure, which all federal highways demand,” the Winona Republican Herald wrote.

In place for two years, the bridge did not meet new, 24-foot standards for a federal highway’s minimum width. The bridge’s removal was part of a project to create a paved, “unbroken” highway to connect Minneapolis/St. Paul with Chicago.

Second life over the Cedar

Over the years, Austinites had thought about a bridge to cross the Cedar’s swampland backwaters that was created by the 1920s into the lake-shaped Austin Mill Pond. For Austin’s first 60-plus years, this area was dotted by islands, with water covering spots that today are part of the mainland, including the pool.

Potential for a bridge improved in 1913 when the Minnesota Legislature approved creating a state park in Austin named after the state’s sixth governor Horace Austin. Major improvements, including dredging and filling parts of the river, ensued for nearly a decade.

Prior to the park, North Main dropped off into a swampland about one block north of Fourth Avenue. Some of the earliest talks about creating a crossing through there was in 1900, when a Mower County commissioner race got heated due to allegations of one candidate promising such a bridge.

In succeeding years, foot bridges arose when the community discussed options for developing the state park. One idea called for leaving the backwaters (no lake-shaped waterbody) and building footbridges to the islands.

Eventually, a wooden footbridge was created in the late 1920s, where the iron bridge was installed later, partly due to Austin’s Izaak Walton League chapter pursuing a game reserve on the other side.

In the summer of 1931, the state helped locals relocate the iron bridge near Chatfield to its new home in Austin. The state, however, reclassified the state park in 1937 as a “scenic wayside” and transferred ownership in 1949 to the city.

Two advantages came from adding a vehicle bridge to the state park:

Mower County – which owns all bridges in the county – got the bridge for cheap from the state and it was better than having nothing there, the Herald wrote in 1959. Previously, downtown traffic heading to the original Hormel plant (which was close to the river) had to use Seventh Street Northeast, east of the downtown dam.

With the bridge, Austin developed a new road to bring Main Street traffic across the river, heading northeasterly along the Hormel plant’s west side.

In 1933, the city designated the new road as “Fox Drive” in honor of Charley Fox, the state park’s manager who made the drive and iron bridge possible.

While the bridge was seen as a positive overall, locals realized when it arrived in Austin that it would not be a perfect fit for crossing the Cedar.  Spanning 154 feet, the bridge was too short to cross on a straight line with Main Street so crews had to slant the bridge at the narrowest point.

“The result has been a traffic bottleneck all these years,” the Herald wrote in 1959.

In 1954, the city and county also opted to build a 5-foot-wide walkway on the bridge’s west side as part of a plan to build a sidewalk from North Main to a residential area north of Mill Pond.

(Part 2 – next week…)