Bell Road Bridge

The Bell Road Bridge is one of only about ten nineteenth-century metal through truss highway bridges in Michigan and one of the few surviving bridges in the state produced by the Wrought Iron Bridge Company of Canton, Ohio, one of the Midwest's most important metal truss bridge-building firms. The Bell Road crossing of the Huron River is located at the site of the nineteenth-century milling settlement of Dover. Dover began with the construction in 1832 of a sawmill by Judge Samuel Dexter and Isaac Pomeroy. In 1846 Daniel B. Sloan & Co. replaced this with a grist mill known as the Dover Mills. Thomas Birkett purchased the Dover Mills following Sloan's death in 1861. In 1849 a 'Base Lake' post office was established, with the post office located at various times at Dover and at Hudson, another nearby milling settlement. In 1882 it was established at Dover and renamed 'Birkett.' The 1874 Washtenaw County atlas shows a settlement of about nine buildings, including the three-story mill and the mansard-roof Birkett house. Birkett built a small Episcopal church in 1875. By 1883 Dover contained a hotel, store, and blacksmith shop. The 1895 county atlas shows about the same number of buildings, but the 1915 one shows only four buildings left. Today little evidence of Dover remains visible. The establishment of mills at the location which became Dover probably led to the opening of Bell Road and the construction of the first crossing at this point. The date when this first bridge was constructed is unknown. A bridge is shown in the 1874 Washtenaw County atlas. More is known of the construction of the present bridge. The July 4, 1890, The Dexter Leader contained the report that 'Petitions have been presented to the commissioners of the towns of Dexter and Webster for a new bridge over the Huron near Base Lake, to replace the old one which is almost a wreck. The petition will be considered at an early date.' Nearly a full year passed, but on June 25, 1891, the Leader reported that 'The township of Dexter will put an iron bridge across the Huron at Birkett.' On September 15, 'The first loads of iron ... were taken to their position' (The Dexter Leader, September 17, 1891). The bridge was completed by early October. On October 8, the Leader was able to crow that 'One of the finest iron bridges in the county now spans the Huron at Dover. It rests on buttresses of superior masonry, the work of Fred Wyman.' The Bell Road Bridge is a product of the Wrought Iron Bridge Company of Canton, Ohio. Wrought Iron Bridge, founded in 1864 by David Hammond and incorporated in 1871, was by 1891 one of the oldest and largest metal-truss bridge producers in the Midwest. Wrought Iron Bridge, like its numerous competitors, fabricated metal-truss bridges such as the Bell Road one in its own shops and generally erected them for the purchaser as well, the contract price generally covering the complete job above the abutments, whose construction was often contracted for separately. Dr. Charles K. Hyde identified fifty Michigan examples of the Wrought Iron Bridge Company's work-- including pony as well as through truss examples --through a Historic American Engineering Record project carried out in 1975-77, the first Michigan historic highway bridge inventory, carried out in the early 1980s, and perusal of nineteenth-century Wrought Iron Bridge Company catalogs. This number is higher by a substantial margin than the number known to have been produced by any other single firm. Today only five remain of these fifty Wrought Iron Bridge Company structures in Michigan. The total number of metal through truss bridges has declined rapidly in Michigan in recent years and nineteenth-century examples have all but vanished. The Bell Road Bridge is one of only about ten nineteenth-century metal through truss bridges which have survived in the entire state.

The Bell Road Bridge is a single-span metal Pratt through truss structure spanning the Huron River. The bridge is 103 feet six inches in length and has a width of thirteen feet five inches. It stands at the site of a nineteenth-century milling settlement known as Dover, of which little now survives. Constructed in 1891, the six-panel structure rests on fieldstone abutments. The bridge stands in a rural, largely wooded setting on Bell Road, a less-than-half-mile east-west connector between Dexter-Pinckney Road and Huron River Drive in Dexter Township about four miles north-northwest of the village of Dexter. The road is unpaved. The bridge is currently closed to vehicular traffic. Rubble fieldstone abutments about ten feet in height support the structure. The west abutment has substantial wingwalls on either side, while the east, where the bank comes steeply down to the river's edge, has none. The abutments are severely deteriorated, with considerable portions of the mortar missing. The truss is constructed with end posts and upper chords formed of spaced back-to-back channels connected by cover plates above and lattice-bracing below. The intermediate posts are fashioned of spaced back-to-back channels with lattice-bracing on both sides. Struts connecting the posts are of back-to-back channels. Portal bracing at each end is constructed of back-to-back angles. Each hip vertical consists of a single square-section eyebar. Pairs of flat eyebars form the lower chords and the diagonal ties in the four central panels, while round-section rods with turnbuckles are used for counters and lateral struts in the central four panels. The bridge's floor is supported by a system of large built-up beams spanning the deck from side to side, with I-beam stringers between them. Each major beam is suspended at the ends from a pair of posts or hip verticals and the space between each pair of beams is spanned by seven stringers. The decking consists of wood planking. Standard metal guardrail forms a railing on either side. The portal at either end of the bridge displays a plaque reading: 1891 WROUGHT IRON BRIDGE Co. BUILDERS CANTON OHIO