Just a few short weeks ago, my son and I, while poking around the back streets of a small country town looking for a certain address, came across a little surprise that brought back a flood of memories to both him and me. There before us, spanning a tiny water-worn limestone ravine where the pleasant sound of water still trickled, was a conserved, well-restored, bowstring bridge.
Scenic bowstring bridges, once popular as a wayside tourist attraction in the Wellington-Waterloo area, hit a soft spot in my heart. My father, my siblings, me, and all four of the Little Lady’s and my children have spent untold pleasant quality hours with a fishing line dropped to the shadowed waters ’neath a bowstring bridge. If the hook was properly baited, with a proper-sized small, wiggly, red worm from the garden, the chances of going home with a half-dozen pan-sized speckled or rainbow trout was almost a sure thing.
This particularly beautiful little bowstring bridge, in its secluded natural setting, bearing a 1928 and WD imprint, was carefully salvaged when so-called progress eventually replaced it on the 20th Sideroad between the Fifth and Sixth Line in old Eramosa township.
It was less than an hour’s barefoot sprint through the country we roamed near our farm during our growing-up years.
The fact that width and strength no longer accommodated the huge farm machinery that was moving into rural areas, along with the predominate thought that “bigger is better,” became the final noose that slated their fate at the county council meetings. Little thought of their historical architecture and scenic value as an outreach tourist attraction was ever considered.
Perhaps thoughts of the bowstrings twanging my heartstrings are a little biased, as they date back to the decade previous to my birth. My father, a young man prior to the early 1930s, then worked as a labourer with a subcontracting construction company headed by a man named Landoni. That company had built quite a number of those bridges in both Wellington and Waterloo Counties. My father knew where each and every one of them could be found.
My parents, during my growing-up years, eked out a living by market gardening. So it was not unusual, as a treat for helping out, to bundle all of us kids into the back of the, then new, 1949 Ford panel truck and each Sunday afternoon go for a drive and stop for a picnic lunch along the roadside. You guessed it; we usually stopped to picnic beside one of those bowstring bridges that he had helped to construct in a younger year.
As we kindled a camp-fire to pan fry our just-caught fish, he would often tell us of intricate happenings while building at whichever particular site we were at.
The conversations spawned educational questions from us, as he verbally pictured how this and that were done with the lack of modern-day tools and equipment.
Water for cement mixing was hauled in hand-filled barrels up from the existing creek by horse. Gravel was hauled by team and wagon from a nearby gravel pit. Bracing for the forms was usually cut by hand with cross-cut and saw-horse on site. And the cement, picked up at the local freight yard, when sloppy and mixed, was pushed by wheelbarrow, usually up wet and slippery planks.
Each summer we would manage to visit, picnic, and fish near four or five of those beautiful bowstring bridges. So eat your heart out, folks, ’cause I ain’t a gonna tell ya where this particular beautiful little privately owned bowstring bag of memories now resides.
Take care, ’cause we care.
barrie@barriehopkins.ca
519-986-4105