I’ve been driving Indiana’s old roads for so many years now that road trips regularly take me through places I’ve been before, where one old road meets another. Two years ago I explored US 50 across Indiana – and what an old-alignment-rich trip it was. When US 50 reaches Bedford, it runs briefly with the old Dixie Highway, the subject of my exploration this year. The two old roads merge for a short while before diverging again, and they leave behind quite a puzzling trail of inconclusive old-alignment evidence. I wrote about it in detail then (read about it here), but cutting to the chase, the red line on this map shows where I think these roads used to go.
That the old-road evidence along the red path is so faded suggests that the road was realigned here probably more than 100 years ago. The imagery available on Google Maps shows a faint two-track path through the field south of modern US 50. Two utility poles stand along it, which is a very good clue. But the best clue is two piers standing in the White River that used to hold up a bridge. You can see the piers from a boat ramp immediately south of modern US 50/State Road 37.
When I was here two years ago, I got an even closer shot of one of the piers.
Given how narrow these piers are, I’ll bet that the bridge they carried was narrow, too. Could it have been a wooden covered bridge? That’d be my guess. But I’ve researched it as far as Google will take me, and that well is dry.
I’ve found evidence of bridges gone by on the National Road and the Michigan Road, too.
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