On a warm winter afternoon, I set out to explore the bridges of Bartholomew County, Indiana, following crossings that traced more than a century of local transportation history. While Columbus is widely known for its architecture, its bridges—rural, urban, abandoned, and modern—offered a clearer sense of how people once moved across this landscape and how those routes have evolved.
I began north of town at the New Hope Bridge, a two-span Pratt through truss carrying County Route 400 North over the Flatrock River. Built in 1913, it grew out of an early twentieth-century push to replace fords with dependable crossings that could support year-round travel. Named for a nearby church founded after the Civil War, the bridge reflected both community identity and agricultural necessity. Its riveted steel, likely fabricated by the locally prominent Caldwell & Drake Iron Works, tied the structure to Columbus’s industrial past, while its late-1990s rehabilitation spoke to a growing recognition of historic bridges as assets rather than obstacles.
A short drive away, the Pugh Ford Bridge stood at a site with a far longer and more troubled history. Long before steel trusses, the crossing served as a shallow ford connecting northern Flatrock Township to Indianapolis by way of the old State Road and nearby rail lines. An ill-fated concrete bridge built in 1909 collapsed during flooding the following year, triggering lawsuits and national scrutiny from Engineering News. The steel replacement completed in 1911 endured for more than a century, but standing there now, with the bridge closed and repairs projected in the millions, this story feels unfinished.
After lunch, I turned toward Columbus and the Newbern Bridge, now repurposed as part of the People Trail. Completed in 1910 by the Vincennes Bridge Company, the pin-connected Camelback Pratt truss began life as a railroad bridge before being adapted for automobiles. Its later dismantling and storage, followed by careful restoration and reinstallation in 2017, illustrated a modern preservation ethic: saving historic infrastructure by finding it a new role. Crossing it on foot, the bridge felt less like a relic and more like a living piece of the city’s layered transportation network.
As the daylight waned, I hiked out to the Rossman Railroad Bridge, abandoned but still commanding Clifty Creek. Its origins reached back to the Madison & Indianapolis Railroad of the 1840s, part of Indiana’s earliest rail expansion. Over time, the line passed through a succession of powerful railroad systems before being abandoned under Conrail in the 1970s. The quiet bridge and overgrown right-of-way suggested the scale of what once moved through here, and what might again, if the corridor were preserved as a trail rather than left to disappear.
I ended the day at the Robert N. Stewart Bridge, where history and modern design converged. Meant to augment the Third Street Bridge, it was built along the path of the earlier Second Street Bridge, which dated from 1884 to 1949. The cable-stayed span opened in 1998 after years of debate over cost, alignment, and environmental concerns. Part of Columbus’s ambitious Front Door Project, it marked a shift from purely functional crossings to bridges as civic statements. Lit at night and renamed in honor of a former mayor, it framed the city not as it once was, but as it aspired to be.
The bridges of Bartholomew County felt like milestones in a continuous story rather than isolated structures. From historic trusses to signature spans, and from backcountry roads to modern throughfares, each crossing revealed how the county adapted its landscape to changing needs.