Our 195th Mystery Bridge has a pair of stories that accompany this salavaged and reused through truss bridge. The first one was my discovery of this site a quarter century ago. The other was the story of the restaurant. We’ll start with my visit first.
It was March 1998, and my college choir from Concordia College (Moorhead) was on tour through central Minnesota, enroute to Minneapolis and Rochester. St. Cloud was one of the stops on tour and we were travelling along Division Street in Waite Park. I had a nice seat on the left side of the coach when I saw a yellow-covered through truss bridge at Frontage Road. It was surrounded by trees yet I could see part of the truss structure. What I found strange and unusual about it was the fact that it was only a section that was saved and it only served as a gateway to somewhere behind the trees. It turns out that after saving the Route 66 Bird Creek Bridges in Catoosa, Oklahoma by reusing them as entry points at Rogers and Molly’s Landings, salvaging (at least a section of) the bridge has indeed become a norm and a reasonable alternative to demolishing a historic bridge altogether.
This bridge entrance was brought back up on the discussion table in social media recently and I figured the time is ripe to find out more about this structure. According to the information from the Stearns County Museum, this section at Anton’s came from a Camelback through truss bridge that once spanned Sauk River. Sauk River empties into the Mississippi River directly in St. Cloud, but not before passing Anton’s Restaurant and boat dock. The truss bridge had seven panels; its connections were riveted. The Howe portal bracings appear to have been the original. The build date behind the truss bridge is between 1915 and 1930, yet there is no information on the bridge builder. While the museum has pin-pointed the location of the bridge along the Sauk River, the question is where exactly was the bridge prior to its relocation to Anton’s.
Likewise is the date of the bridge’s replacement and the salvaging of this section also unknown. The bridge was most likely replaced during the 1980s, yet because of its historic significance and perhaps the its popularity among locals, a section of the bridge was salvaged and relocated to Anton’s, to be used as the entrance to the site. Why this was done and how this was done remains unknown, but when the section was saved, four truss panels, the portal and the upper portion of the strut bracing were saved, the rest- upper chord and a diagonal beam in the fourth panel were all scrapped.
This leads to the following questions regarding this bridge section at Anton’s:
- Where along the Sauk River did the bridge originate from?
- When was the bridge built and by whom?
- What were the dimensions of the original bridge?
- When was the bridge replaced?
- When was this section by Anton’s erected; by whom and why was this done?
To close off this Mystery Bridge article, we have the second story behind this bridge section. It has to do with the restaurant Anton’s itself. The restaurant was part of a series of wooden cabins and a lodge named Woodland Lodge, developed over a century ago. Mr. Brick’s was the name of the restaurant, and the owner had live entertainment for many decades. The restaurant was bought by Anton (Tony) Gaetz and his wife Lorraine in 1973 and that is where the name change took place. While live entertainment was discontinued in the 1980s, the restaurant at the same time offered a full menu to the customers. A lot has changed in the past 50 years, but Anton’s and its history- including the untold stories- has become one of the popular eating places in St. Cloud.
And now this pontist has another reason to add to the list- this Mystery Bridge! The untold story of how this piece got here, unless someone tries to crack the code! 🙂
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Website to Anton’s: https://www.antonsrestaurant.com/
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Special thanks to Carrie Shofner for the photos. 🙂
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The Bridgehunter's Chronicles 