This was Wednesday’s view looking west across the footbridge from the preserve-side of Cranberry Run. The photo wasn’t taken Wednesday, but Antioch College Intern Emma snapped it a couple of weeks ago. Since it was dry as a bone from before that point until Wednesday night, the photo could have been taken three days ago.
A fox squirrel probably lifted the pine cone between then and then, but you get the picture.
Historic records and reminiscences indicate that Cranberry Run, known affectionately in these parts as the Little Cranberry, was a trickle narrow enough for a skip and a jump to cross. The rush of water, sped via human ingenuity north through the Allen County and the southeast corner of Putnam, has accelerated the bankfull width to a current 10 to 15 feet as it falls to Riley Creek.
That’s a little more than a hop to cross. The first Cranberry Run footbridge (in my memory) stretched from the west to a landbridge between the stone quarry and the Run. After channelization in the 1980s, before the Army Corps theoreticized and modeled this ineffectual practice away to leave a native waterway to do what native waterways do best, another bridge was built at a bend 100 yards south. When that gave way, the most recent bridge was engineered downstream again.
This footbridge spans the little creek about 1/8 of a mile upstream of the confluence with the Riley, itself a tributary to the Blanchard River. The structure was built nearly a decade ago and was designed to allow floodwaters to pass through widely-spaced slats. Each end was boxed around trees on opposite banks. Chains were attached to the telephone pole bases, buried and stretched to anchor to other trees.
The bridge held fast until last year when the weathering effects of floodplain fills and heavy windfall from the 2012 derecho carved away enough bank that the anchor trees caved. In 2015, volunteer David Seitz winched and wrangled the structure back into shape, but he knew this was a stop-gap. Sure enough, Wednesday’s 3 to 4 inches of fast, hard rainfall swelled the stream into a fast-moving lake. This morning, I parted the black raspberries along the path and saw that the bridge now angles northwest to southeast rather than due east.
