Lots of great memories of the ‘Old Byron Bridge’

For 64 years, Byron’s truss bridge carried farmers, families and travelers across the Shoshone River. Then, on an April afternoon in 1978, it gave way beneath a tractor.

As someone who drives far too many miles and hikes into strange places just to see a historic bridge, I am genuinely sorry I never got to cross the beautiful old suspension bridge below Byron.

Photographs show a classic metal structure with an open framework rising above its narrow roadway. It was the kind of bridge that announced itself long before a traveler reached the river.

Its replacement is safer and better suited for modern traffic, but it has almost none of its predecessor’s character. It carries people across the Shoshone efficiently, but about as romantically as a cattle guard.

The old bridge was something different.

Byron was founded in 1900 on high ground north of the Shoshone River. The river provided water that made settlement and farming possible, but it also separated the town from fields and roads to the south. A dependable crossing was not a luxury. It was essential.

Wyoming then had no state highway department. Counties built most public bridges, often hiring Midwestern companies that shipped prefabricated steel components west for assembly.

A 1913 Powell Tribune newspaper article headlined “Byron to Have New Bridge” reported that Big Horn County commissioners were preparing to award two contracts to the Monarch Engineering Company of Falls City, Nebraska. One was for a 120-foot bridge over the Greybull River at Anderson’s Ford. The other was for a 220-foot bridge over the Shoshone at Byron.

Monarch offered two alternatives for the Byron crossing. A two-span bridge would cost $5,210, while a single-span structure would cost $6,612. The two-span bridge was selected.

For more than six decades, the Byron bridge carried wagons, automobiles, tractors, pickups and farm trucks. When older crossings closer to Lovell were damaged by floods or ice jams, drivers sometimes detoured through Byron to cross the river.

For local children, however, the bridge was more than transportation. It was part playground, part gathering place and part test of courage.

John Rogers remembered riding his bicycle down the hill toward the bridge, “hoping you made it onto the bridge,” and crossing it on his way to and from school. Dale Harvey lived less than a mile away and said his family drove or walked across it every day. They also spent countless hours playing around it. “Good memories,” he said.

Rogers remembered good fishing beneath the bridge, while Robert McConnell called it the “best place to go swimming.” In winter, Janet Marie Dugger Haddix rode horses down to the river to ice skate. Marian Ray Esterholt remembered walking down the S-curve, crossing the bridge and climbing down a girder to reach ice formed by water overflowing along the south bank. Wearing metal skates that clamped onto their shoes, the children maneuvered between tall grasses frozen into the rough ice.

The bridge also invited the sort of risks young people survived without telling their parents. Glen S. Hopkinson once accepted a dare to climb to the top and walk across a beam “like a real tightrope walker.”

Edd Johnson left a more permanent mark. Looking at an old photograph, he could still see the curve he put into the railing while returning from the 1960 homecoming dance. The road was covered with snow or slick frost, he recalled, and he was “obviously going too fast.”

By the 1970s, the bridge was showing its age. Its weight limit had been reduced to 10 tons, and Big Horn County was preparing to replace it. Girders for a new bridge had already been delivered to the site.

The old bridge did not survive long enough to be retired gracefully.

On Saturday afternoon, April 1, 1978, Eustacio Yanez, an employee of Byron farmer John Abraham, drove a tractor onto the bridge. A fertilizer spreader was attached behind it as Yanez headed across the river to work in an alfalfa field.

The Powell Tribune reported that the spreader was only about one-third full. Abraham said that even if it had been filled, the combined tractor and spreader would not have exceeded the bridge’s posted limit.

As Yanez crossed, he felt the bridge begin to sway. He looked over his shoulder and saw one end pulling away from the riverbank.

“Maybe no more Eustacio,” he remembered thinking.

The bridge did not plunge into the river at once. It fell slowly, giving Yanez what Abraham described as additional time for prayer. The tractor dropped 20 to 30 feet before the bridge deck came to rest in the river.

Remarkably, Yanez was uninjured. The tractor’s cab, axle and other parts were badly damaged.

“It wasn’t a weight problem,” Abraham said. “It was an old age problem.”

That was the local verdict, although surviving newspaper accounts do not include a formal engineering investigation. Photographs show the bridge folded into the river, its roadway twisted and its beams hanging over the tractor below.

County workers closed the approaches and redirected traffic across the Penrose bridge about seven miles upriver. There was considerable irony in the timing. The old bridge had lasted 64 years, only to fail when its replacement was already waiting nearby in pieces.

The present Road 5 bridge was part of that replacement project. Records date it to 1977, apparently reflecting when work began, although the old Byron bridge didn’t fail until April of 1978.

There is no question that the replacement is better suited to modern traffic. Historic bridges were narrow, difficult to maintain and unable to safely carry many of today’s trucks and agricultural machines.

Still, something was lost when the Byron bridge fell. Old metal bridges reveal how they work. Their cables, towers and connections are exposed. You hear the tires on the deck, see the river through the framework and sometimes feel the slightest movement beneath you.

I wish I could have driven slowly through those steel trusses and stopped on the other side for one last look back.