The historic State Line Bridge along the Kankakee River has been attracting attention for decades. It’s been attracting logjams, too, which can exacerbate flooding.
“It’s just a real thorn in the side to those who care about the natural flow of water along the river,” Kankakee River Basin and Yellow River Basin Development Commission Executive Director Pelath said.
“It’s not the only problem bridge along the Kankakee River – there are some other ones – but it’s certainly one of the top one or two bridges that pose an ongoing flood hazard,” he said.
The agency has budgeted $200,000 for 2025 to prepare the worksite for removing the bridge in 2026.
The commission removed a Norfolk Southern Railroad bridge near Schneider earlier this year.
Pelath said he has been working since his first day on the commission to get the State Line Bridge removed, but the effort predates his tenure there. “Many had been working on it before me,” he said.
The bridge used to connect to Bridge No. 2 at Clay Street in Lake County, but now it’s separated, so the State Line Bridge is now a standalone issue.
It has been closed to traffic for a quarter of a century, having been taken out of service in 1999, Pelath said.
“I’ve been gratified that people are generally in agreement that if you want to enjoy State Line Bridge as a historic relic, you don’t want to enjoy it where it is,” he said.
The commission plans to disassemble the bridge and number the parts so it could be reassembled elsewhere if some other entity wants to take that on. “I have a fairly good degree of confidence that there will be some interest in it,” Pelath said. “There’s a number of organizations and units of government that have an interest in that type of bridge for display.”
Reassembling it elsewhere will take money and planning.
Removing the bridge from the Kankakee River will likely be done with cash the commission has on hand, rather than borrowing money for the work, Pelath said. However, its removal will require the permission of a large group of regulators.
“Whenever you’re working that close to the channel, and in this case in the channel, you’re going to have Indiana Department of Natural Resources Division of Water because you’re going to have construction or floodway requirements, even if it’s temporary. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, too, because it’s a navigable waterway. If you have any sort of discharges or temporary wetland impacts – anything put there would be temporary, just for removal purposes, and then removed – there’s still a process to go through. And because it’s likely a historic eligible bridge, you’re going to have the state historic preservation officer,” Pelath said. “But from a federal standpoint, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is sort of the lead agency for a lot of the other federal entities.”
“The good news is we start talking with regulators early on before applications are even submitted, so we have applications that are going to make sense to the agencies and to us and are recommended by our technical consultants,” he said. “We have a good early coordination process available to us. It’s pretty gratifying that those discussions are beginning because it means that you’re starting to have a project in view.”
The tentative plan, subject to regulatory approval, is to use a crane on each side so the bridge can be walked off the river before it’s disassembled and numbered, then stored responsibly elsewhere.
Pelath checked with Eagle Creek Township Board member John Jurs, who doesn’t know the age of the bridge but figures it was in place before the Kankakee River was straightened more than a century ago.
HistoricBridges.org lists the bridge as officially built in 1926, according to the National Bridge Inventory, but likely was there before then because of its design. “This bridge is an extremely rare example of one-lane pin-connected Pennsylvania through truss bridge,” the website says.
State Sen. Rick Niemeyer recalls driving cattle across the bridge in his youth, Pelath said.
The water level is just under the bridge’s deck, which obviously is a problem when it floods. Also, getting heavy equipment to the logjams to clear them even when the flood stage is minor can be an issue, Pelath said.
The bridge is accessible to the public, which draws attention to it, but it isn’t the only problematic bridge.
“There’s a railroad bridge just downstream of I-65,” Pelath said. “It’s not accessible by the public. I don’t know how old it is, but it’s in a 1908 photo.”
The supports are very close together, so they trap a lot of debris. But the trains using that bridge transport coal to the Schahfer Generating Station in Wheatfield, so it isn’t a candidate for quick removal.
“You can see plenty of bridges have been removed over the years if you go up and down the channel,” Pelath said. “A lot of those old concrete bridge supports, you see them all over the place.” A good example is where the Monon railroad crossed the river at U.S. 421, he said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
