Indian Lake Road Stone Arch Bridge

Built in 1891 by the Detroit & Bay City Railroad, the Indian Lake Road Bridge is one of only a small number of stone arch railroad bridges known to exist in Michigan. The bridge may possess additional significance as the work of an African American, Fred B. Pelham, who, graduated at the head of his class in engineering at the University of Michigan, was serving as assistant engineer of the Michigan Central Railroad (which operated the Detroit & Bay City) at the time this structure was built and was reported to have designed and built twenty bridges for the railroad. Stone arch bridges are a rarity in Michigan.

While no systematic attempt to locate all examples has been made, the statewide Historic American Engineering Record surveys undertaken by Dr. Charles Hyde during the mid-1970s and the statewide historic highway bridge inventory projects carried out in two phases during the early 1980s and mid-1990s identified only a handful of examples, and only a few more have come to the State Historic Preservation Office's attention by other means. Three stone arch highway bridges, two of them in Marshall, have survived, the oldest apparently dating from 1891. Of stone arch railroad bridges, the known examples date from the 1860s to the 1890s (the date of construction of one is unknown, but estimated to be c. 1890).

The Indian Lake Road Stone Arch Bridge is a single-span arch bridge that, constructed of rock-face ashlar masonry, once carried the Detroit & Bay City Railroad line over Indian Lake Road. It is constructed of yellowish-brown sandstone. The arch is nineteen feet in width between the abutments and twenty-one feet in length from outer face to outer face. The height to the top of the arch is about twelve feet and to the top of the parapet 15.75 feet.

Wingwalls that extend out on both sides of the arch give the structure a total width of about seventy feet. The bridge formerly carried the Detroit & Bay City railroad line, which ran along a route that in this area occupied an embankment located just east of Michigan route M-24, a four-lane divided highway in this area. The bridge runs in a north-northwest to south-southeast direction spanning Indian Lake Road, a narrow east-west road running along the boundary of Oakland County's Lake Orion and Oxford townships. The area is in the midst of a population and development surge.

The bridge and former railroad right of way are not currently in use. The arch itself springs from atop the fifth course of masonry on either side that is visible above ground level. The tops of the vouissoirs are cut level and two pairs of side-by-side vouissoirs each supports a single regular horizontal block of stone on either side of the central four vouissoirs and the keystone. A projecting one course high cap crowns the outer edge of the arch on either side.

The wingwalls are also built of regular blocks of stone of the same height as those in the abutments, so that the courses align. The stone at the far east end of the southeastern wingwall displays '1891' carved in its upper surface.