Klenklen Bridge HAER No. M0-91 Spanning the Lamine River at County Road 223 Vicinity of Pleasant Green Cooper County Missouri \ PHOTOGRAPHS HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE DATA REDUCED COPIES OF MEASURED DRAWINGS Historic American Engineering Record National Park Service Rocky Mountain Regional Office P.O. Box 25287 Denver, Colorado 80225-0287 HISTORIC AMERICAN ENGINEERING RECORD KLENKLEN BRIDGE HAER No. M0-91 Site Location: Spanning the Lamine River at County Road 223; 4.3 miles northwest of Pleasant Green; southwest quarter of Section 20, Township 47 North, Range 19 West; Cooper County, Missouri. USGS quadrangle: Clifton City, Missouri (7\-Minute series) Present Owner: Cooper County, Missouri Present Use: closed (scheduled for demolition in 1996) Present Condition: partially collapsed Construction Date: September 1929 - April 1930 Designer: R. T. Faith, Calhoun, Missouri J.A. Dice, Warsaw, Missouri Builder: J.A. Dice, Warsaw, Missouri Significance: Bridge builder J.A. Dice (1866-1947] built over thirty wire suspension bridges between 1895 and 1940 in central Missouri. Ten of these remain in place today with varying degrees of physical integrity. As a group, these spans comprise the state's most important exam­ ples of vernacular bridge construction, designed and built without benefit of detailed structural analysis. Dice built his suspension spans empirically using easily obtained materials and hand labor, and, as a result, they cost substantially less than comparable steel truss spans. They were strikingly lightweight, however, and have fared poorly in subsequent years. Before its recent structural failure, the Klenklen Bridge was distinguished as one of the best-preserved of the remaining Dice-built bridges. It is still an excellent example of an esoteric structural type-among Missouri's most technologically noteworthy spans from the inter-war period. Written by: Clayton B. Fraser FRASERdesign 1269 Cleveland Avenue Loveland1 Colorado 80537 October 1995 If Klenklen Bridge Ii HAER No. M0-91 II page 2 The Historic American Engineering Record [HAER] documentation for the l<Jen­ klen Bridge was conducted by Fraserdesign of Loveland. Colorado. under contract with Cooper Counfy. Missouri. Cooper Counfy hos proposed the demolition of the bridge in 1996. due in port to recent slippage of its north abutment. This recordation is intended to mitigate. in port. the impact on the bridge by the demolition. Research. oral interviews and photographic re­ cordation were undertaken in June 1994. The research for this project has involved five principal archival sources: the Cooper Counfy Clerk's Office. the Friends of Historic Boonville Archive and the Boonslick Regional Library. all located in Boonville. Missouri: and the Missouri state Library and Missouri Highway and Transportation Department. both located in Jefferson Ctty. Mis­ souri. Special thanks go to Mr. Joseph Larm of Pilot Grove. Missouri. The last surviving laborer from the 1929 construction. Mr. Larm provided information on Joe Dice and the building of the Klenklen Bridge. 1 The bridge that I.A. Dice built over the Lamine River in 1929-30 was like the many structures he had built during his 45-year career in central Missouri. A sus­ pension span that stretched some 211 feet, it was remarkably light in construc­ tion, with parallel-strand cables held aloft by steel towers and anchored to enormous concrete deadmen buried in the ground. To these cables were wrapped wire suspenders, which held the floor beams that in turn supported the stringers and deck. The bridge was unbraced, sometimes swinging dra­ matically in the wind or sagging under the weight of heavy loads. In its con­ struction, the Klenklen Bridge closely resembled both the first span Dice had worked on in 1895 and his last bridge, completed a few years before his death in 1947. Dice's bridges were unlike the thousands of other vehicular structures being erected across Missouri and the Midwest at that time. These other concrete and steel structures were designed by civil engineers in the state and federal highway departments. Developed using rigorous structural analysis and based upon standards circulated by such industry and professional organizations as AASHTO and the American Steel Institute, these structures largely represented the engineering state of the art. In contrast with these were the sinewy spans built by J.A. Dice. Dice never performed structural calculations for his bridg­ es, never even surveyed their sites with a transit. Instead he used a ball of string and his own empirical judgement to lay out his spans and vernacular construction methods to build them. As a typical Dice-built structure, the Klenklen Bridge represents the grace and elegance-and eventual failure­ achieved by a craftsman builder and a handful of local workers. Fraserdesign a !@ Klenklen Bridge II HAER No. M0-91 1111 page 3 Cooper County, like virtually all of Missouri's counties, followed a clearly defined pro­ gression in its bridge construction in the 19th century, in response to evolving transportation needs and technological development in the bridge industry. The first simple spans, built as the county was undergoing its initial settlement, were rudimentary timber structures. These were cheap and easy to build but lacking in durability and limited in span length. With greater revenues from increased settlement, the county could undertake more ambitious timber/iron combination trusses in the 1850s and 1860s. These, in turn, were superseded in the late 1870s by all-iron spans, made readily available by mass production. Wrought iron was replaced by steel for bridge superstructures in the 1890s, as the industry developed trusses that were more sturdy and more efficient. After the turn of the century, the county undertook several ambitious, long­ span steel trusses at major crossings of the Lamine River and Petite Saline and Moniteau creeks. The first of these was the Maston Bridge, a steel truss erect­ ed in 1901 to replace an existing covered bridge over the Lamine. 2 The Mas­ ton Bridge was followed over the next two years by major spans over the Mon­ iteau on the Boonville-California Road, over the Petite Saline at Campbell's Ford, and over the Lamine River at the mouth of Blackwater Creek. Through the rest of the decade the county built successively longer trusses, including the Turley Bridge [1907], the Otterville Ford Bridge (1908], the Bryant Bottom Bridge (1908], the Dicks Bridge (1908] and the Roberts Ford Bridge (1910]. Fabricated and built by the Kansas City Bridge Company, these latter struc­ tures all featured pin-connected Parker superstructures supported by stone masonry or tubular steel abutments.3 The ascendence of the automobile in the 191 Os and 1920s prompted incremen­ tal changes in the condition of roads and bridges in Cooper County. This was symbolized graphically by the erection of an immense new steel highway bridge over the Missouri River at Boonville. Dedicated on July 4, 1924, the Boonville Bridge marked the massive shift from wagon haulage to the motor­ ized automobile and truck that occurred between the two world wars. After completion of the Boonville structure, the state highway department routed State Highway 2-later U.S. Highway 40, a principal east-west route across Missouri-through Boonville. According to historian E.J. Melton: Improved highways brought fleets of trucks and inaugurated pickup and delivery from doors of business houses and overnight service from St. Louis and Kansas City. Through freight by truck from St. Louis. Chicago. Kansas City and other points developed rapidly. Auto transports from northern automo­ bile manufacturing centers followed. Farmers began hauling their livestock to market. Others hired independent truckers. who. in some instances. be­ came coal dealers. transporHng from Boone and Randolph counties' mines.4 Fraserdesgn • !,!,!,!, Klenklen Bridge II HAER No. M0-91 II page 4 Despite improvements on the trunk lines, virtually all of Cooper County's secondary roads were still only dirt or gravel tracks before the Depression. The majority of the major river crossings featured bridges that had been built in the century before. Some still had no bridges at all. The latter was the case where a county road crossed the Lamine River near Joe Klenklen's farm [see Figure 1]. Located at the western edge of the county some four miles northwest of Pleasant Green, the Klenklen ford was situated on a broad easterly curve of the river. The Thomas Bridge [1907] spanned the Lamine 1 \ miles north, and another span crossed it 2 \ miles south. During the 1920s, residents of Blackwater and Clear Creek townships petitioned the Coop­ er County Court periodically for a permanent bridge at the Klenklen ford, citing the inconvenience of traveling to either of the other crossings. To help defray the cost of construction, they raised a subscription among themselves and offered it to the county. Each time they submitted a petition, however, the court rejected or continued it. The subscription stood at $1400 in May 1929, when A.J. Deuschle once again petitioned the Cooper County Court on behalf of the citizens' group. This time, instead of tabling the petition, the judges agreed to appropriate $4000 toward the bridge's construction. The cost of bridge building had risen measurably since the 191 Os when county had erected its last major spans over the Lamine River. A 180-foot truss span that the county engineer surveyed for the Klenklen site would have cost less than $8000 at that time. By 1929 its cost had more than doubled-money that Cooper County could ill afford in the financially depressed period that preced­ ed the Great Depression. As a more economical alternative, the court opted to build a suspension bridge, which, with its lightweight superstructure, would cost substantially less than a fixed-span truss. The court acknowledged this in its approval of funds for the proposed Klenklen bridge. The appropriation would be made, the judges stated, "when and if said citizens build a suspen­ sion bridge under specifications, agreement and contract as specified and approved by the county.