Photo TR: Covered Bridge Festival

[spaceace12]

I took a short trip up to Bridgeton, IN to go to the Covered Bridge Festival. It was originally a festival to celebrate the counties covered bridges. Now, the festival is getting more commercialization. More flea market and mass produced thing instead of home made items people trying to sell. There is another town not far from Bridgeton where it basically is a giant flea market.

 

Anyway, another gripe from me is the out of town food vendors. These a basically carnies who travel from show to show to make money. I normally do not buy from these folks and only buy from the locals so the money stays local. Anyway, rant over, here is some pictures.

I took all these pictures with my 100 dollar camera. My big camera would have done better, but oh well.

 

This one I like because of the old Thunderbird sitting there (or a corvette, I don't know which one it is). I also believe this is the owner of a local bank's house.

WTF? Look at that winshield...I mean barn door.

I love the style of this cruiser.

Motorcycles are my new drug. This one looks awesome.

One thing I hate is all the people that come to the festival, and I also like it since my mom makes money that way also.

The new bridge. I have some pictures of the new bridge on my portable hd as it was being built and will upload those later.

The mill is returning to water power. The water inlet was just recently chizzed out again.

Not too long after the bridge was cleaned up, it was decided to build another one. The old one was not publicly owned. So the owner of the mill had to build it. Soon people were donating money to help. Then people were donated trees, then a tree harvesting company donated to get those trees. Then a couple people with big saws donated time to cut up those trees. Then people donated time to help build those trees. By festival time 2006, the new bridge was in place. With no Gov't money, the bridge was built in less than a year.

 

And it cost less than 500k (I think around 200k) to build

spray paint picture making.

April 2005, the bridge goes up in flames.

The original bridge. Some idiot decided it would be a good idea to light it on fire and destroy in 2005. He was caught before he almost burnt down another bridge not too far away. They should burn him.

The bridge and dam.

 

If you look to the right of this picture, you will see the lower portion of the dam is a solid wall. That is new, the mill owner is working on diverting the water to that side so he can cut out the wood that the dam is made out of to make this a wall straight across. Then after that is complete, he is going to crown it on the top and the dam will be the way it was built back when it was new.

 

Once the top is done, the whole area under the bridge will be just water, instead of two water ways.

the mill produced corn meal.

the machine that takes corn and makes is powder.

The scale out in front of the mill.

The old mill in town. Currently ran on electricity.

better, but still think it is factory produced things.

JUNK!

My ride to get up to the festival....or not.

 

Though on the way I couldn't help but think how much fun a motorcycle would be on this back road to get there. It was full of turns that would be real fun on a bike.

Why not start out on the whole reason I made this trip. The best ham and cheese around. Texas toast bread with a big helping of ham.

 

The person who runs this booth is a real nice guy. I worked for him at the festival a few years ago. Since then he has boguht the property and built perm. buildings.

[spaceace12]

Here is the bridge pictures. I don't have any digital pictures of the old bridge.

Thanks for viewing...any comments?

How the bridge was joined at joints.

The under side of the bridge. Just looks neat.

Not too long after the siding was put on.

Just after the bridge shell had been moved onto the abudments.

[TheBannedKid]

The old mill in town. Currently ran on electricity.

Stop me if I'm stupid, but what else would it run on? Human farts?

[spaceace12]

Water. It was ran on it before, turbines were below the mill that run belts. Belts turn the machinery. At some point, electricity was run to run the mill. Some mills ran on water power from a wheel.