Job Corps teams with borough to rescue historic bridge

Spongy with saturation, the massive beams of the 1917 bridge that once supported loads of Alaska Railroad cars filled with high-quality Chickaloon Mine coal are showing considerable wear. In an effort to preserve the one-of-a-kind bridge, and the link to a key piece of Valley history it provides, the Alaska Job Corps carpentry department teamed up with the Mat-Su Borough to provide a roof to stave off further deterioration.

A stack of trusses and other necessary lumber were dropped off Wednesday, and Job Corps workers will be suiting up in harnesses this week to secure trusses and affix a metal roof to the bridge that once spanned the Chickaloon River.

It's a plan that has been a long time in the making -- the project to preserve the bridge has languished without funding for more than a decade.

"It's been sitting here 20 years," said Mat-Su Borough Cultural Resource Specialist Fran Seager-Boss of the bridge's present location.

Instead of providing access across a river bed, the bridge now sits on a gravel pad on the opposite side of the river, spanning 121 feet of public road right of way.

Now set aside for public enjoyment and historical preservation, the bridge once had another use. According to information from the borough, it and its twin, another 121-foot timber-truss bridge that spanned the Chickaloon River a short distance upriver, were engineered in 1915 and built in 1917. The construction came after Woodrow Wilson, the nation's new president, signed a bill authorizing a government-built Alaska railroad in 1914.

Clearing the land and establishing a railroad in an area without a transportation infrastructure proved difficult at times. Construction of a trestle and bridge across Eagle River Canyon stalled work in 1915 and, after the bridge was constructed in 1916, the crews faced the challenge of working through Alaska's winter. Horse-drawn sleds reportedly hauled equipment up Knik Arm over the frozen Matanuska River, allowing work at winter camps that spread over the 18 remaining miles of right-of-way to continue throughout the year.

Meanwhile, the steel-worker's gang at Peters' Creek went on strike, demanding a base wage of 50 cents an hour -- 12 1/2 cents more than they were making. A labor union was established, and workers eventually returned to work while awaiting a report by a group appointed by Washington D.C. officials. The group was tasked with establishing a new wage scale -- a scale eventually accepted by the labor union and commissioners overseeing the railroad construction, although labor-management relations still remained strained.

Difficulties aside, the railroad reached Chickaloon on Oct. 20, 85 years ago this month.

According to information from the borough, the rail link provided a way to haul coal from the Matanuska coal fields to Anchorage and on to Seward. One million dollars was appropriated by Congress in 1920 for the U.S. Navy to invest in the mine, but that appropriation came after a significant amount of money had already been invested. About 30 frame and log buildings were constructed to form a townsite on the Valley floor. Numerous sets of train tracks bisected the 480 acres that made up the townsite and the mine, providing transportation for workers and freight to the cottages, mess hall, stores and other townsite buildings and the mine entrance. Much of the construction at the mine had already taken place by the time the Congressional appropriation came, but the late-coming appropriation indicated the level of importance of the mine at the time.

The rail link and mine was developed for sole use by the Navy. The Navy's interest in the coal was straightforward -- they needed high-quality coal to power their ships. But even in 1920, correspondence from the Secretary of the Navy indicated the mine would not be a permanent venture.

And it wasn't. Although the mine was expanded while it was in operation, workers found that extensive faulting made extraction difficult, as miners had to repeatedly remove rock walls in order to plunge deeper into the mine. As work progressed, the rock walls made the mining process very expensive, and it became economically unfeasible. Although officials estimated about 15,000 tons would be produced each year, in 1922, after about two years of production, only 8,000 tons had been extracted.

After the mine was closed, the two bridges that spanned the Chickaloon River were converted with planks to support vehicles in the 1930s. That use continued until 1981, when, according to reports from the borough, a fatal accident occurred and the bridges were deemed unsafe.

Instead of dismantling the bridges permanently, area residents convinced the state of the bridges' historical value. They were the only two-timber constructed Through-Howe Truss bridges of their size in Alaska.

When the dismantling was proposed, the bridge situated further up Chickaloon River Road was declared unsalvageable and dynamited into pieces. Some of those pieces are now housed at the Museum of Alaska Transportation and Industry near Wasilla.

The lower bridge was moved to the side of the road a few hundred yards from its original location by Anchorage engineering firm Peratrovich Nottingham and Drage, in 1982. Dennis Nottingham, PND president, said his company was brought in on the job because state agencies were unsure how to move such a weighty -- and deteriorating -- piece of history.

"That bridge probably weighs two- to three-hundred tons," Nottingham said. "That's small by our standards."

But the Alaska Department of Transportation isn't in the business of moving existing bridges, so PND was hired to choreograph the move.

PND also designed the roof structure now being built for the bridge. Nottingham said the goal behind the design was simplicity.

"Primarily, the idea was to keep it as light as possible and keep the rain off it," Nottingham said. "Those old wooden structures were not treated and they tend to deteriorate."

Nottingham said the upper timbers were treated several years ago, in an effort to preserve them, and they are still in relatively good shape. Other timbers, however, haven't fared as well. Walking along the bridge, it's not hard to see where boards have been removed by people possibly scouting for firewood.

According to Seager-Boss, a magazine specifically targeting covered bridges recently requested the engineering drawings for the bridge in their pages, and were interested in highlighting the bridge's design.

Over the coming days, Job Corps students will affix the trusses to the bridge and place the metal roofing. And through that protection, the historical value of the bridge will be evident to another generation of Alaskans.

"It was quite an engineering feat," Seager-Boss said.