Blugolds assist effort to add 143-year-old bridge to historic register

The Wisconsin Historical Society named the 143-year-old High Bridge to the state register in May after it was determined to be significant to Wisconsin’s heritage. With the state approval, an application has been sent to the National Park Service for consideration for the bridge to be added to the National Register of Historic Places.

“I think this is service-learning in the truest sense,” says Dr. John Mann, professor of history and director of the university’s public history program. “In this case, students learned about preservation, they applied what they learned and they directly benefited the community by helping the city comply with federal preservation laws.”

The 900-foot-long High Bridge that spans the Chippewa River just downriver from Dell’s Dam is officially named the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis and Omaha Railway Bridge, but is referred to locally as the High Bridge because its deck is approximately 80 feet above the normal river level, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.

The iron lattice deck truss bridge was built for rail traffic in 1881. The structure was abandoned in 1992, converted into a scenic pedestrian bridge along the Chippewa River State Trail in 2015 and recognized as a local landmark by the city of Eau Claire Landmark Commission a year later.

In 2017, Mann was a member of the Landmark Commission and aware that city officials were interested in seeing Eau Claire structures nominated to the National Register of Historic Places. Students in Mann’s public history seminar class do archival research on topics of history interpretation for community partners during their spring semester classes. The High Bridge was among the topics the class examined that year under the topic of historic transportation in the Chippewa Valley.

A class group researched the history of the High Bridge, critiqued the work and created an application draft for submission to the state historic register. The draft was reviewed, revised and submitted by Megan Beer-Pemberton, a historian with Wisconsin engineering firm CORRE Inc., who received her bachelor’s degree in history and master’s degree in public history from UW-Eau Claire.

Beer-Pemberton was a student of Mann’s in both her undergraduate and graduate studies where she was introduced to the many opportunities in the history field outside of academia. Beer-Pemberton calls the work on the historic designation project by UW-Eau Claire students, faculty and alumni “a perfect example of how collaboration among all three can work in a real-life scenario.”

“Though a student may graduate from an institution such as UWEC, you never really stop being a ‘student’ and we are fortunate that the staff is so accessible for us to reach out to even after graduating,” Beer-Pemberton says. “It’s a great example of how alumni can help current students with their coursework and provide guidance for the workforce post-graduation.”

The historic designation application was delayed after a bridge railing was damaged in a storm in June 2021, when inspectors found significant cracking and settling of the limestone piers that prompted closure of the structure. After $3.4 million in repairs to multiple bridge piers, the bridge reopened to pedestrians in March 2022.

Beer-Pemberton noted that Eau Claire city officials were supportive of the historic designation efforts and provided the team with engineering information from the repairs so the application could be updated for consideration by the State Historical Society.

The bridge rehabilitation received two awards in 2023: The Wisconsin Historical Society Historic Preservation Award and the American Public Works Association Wisconsin chapter award for Small Cities/Rural Communities Project of the Year.

The High Bridge is the second project from the spring 2017 UW-Eau Claire class to be named to the State Register of Historic Places. The Soo Line Railroad Bridge, referred to locally as the S-Bridge, near Banbury Place was named to the state and national registers in 2022.

Rachel Lange, curator at the Chippewa Valley Museum, was a student in the 2017 UW-Eau Claire public history class. Her team researched the history of the S-Bridge as she was completing her undergraduate work, and she had just moved back to Eau Claire to work when she found out the bridge had been accepted onto the register.

“We knew it was a possibility early on in the project that the bridges could end up on the register, but knowing that they actually did has been incredibly cool,” says Lange, who earned a bachelor’s degree in public history at UW-Eau Claire. “A lot of time and effort went into the projects, and it was a full-circle moment for me.”

Lange says the public history seminar class was valuable to her personally as it helped her approach projects from a variety of angles to get the best outcome.

“It was really key to helping me get comfortable with researching projects instead of just events and people,” Lange says. “This is a skill I use every day in my job.”