A Note From Josh: Nobody Decides to Lose a Building

Nobody ever decides to lose a building.

That's the thing I've come to understand doing this work. Landmarks don't come down by a vote. They get lost the way anything gets lost — a repair gets put off, and then put off again, and the number goes up every year it waits, until it's big enough that a reasonable person says the responsible thing now is to take it down. Nobody in that chain did anything wrong. The building's gone anyway.

Losing something takes nobody. Saving it takes somebody, over and over, for years.

I've been thinking about that all summer because of a bridge in Jones County.

Almost everything a community owns can be replaced. A road gets repaved. A school gets rebuilt bigger than it was. But there's no rebuilding an 1893 stone arch. Reuben Ely and his son turned three elliptical arches over Deer Creek out of rock they pulled from the creek bed, with dressed limestone from the quarries at Stone City for the faces. No keystone in any of them. Two courses of stone, nothing at the crown locking it together, and it has carried itself for a hundred and thirty-three years on nothing but the accuracy of the cutting.

I can hire good masons. I could not hire that back. Reuben and his son are buried at Oakwood in Monticello, a mile and a half from the arches they set. Whatever they knew went with them, and what you'd get if you tried to reproduce it is a replica, not the thing. That's what "lost forever" actually means. Not lost for a while. Not lost until somebody funds it later.

The Iowa DOT's inventory of historic stone arch structures is down to ten across the whole state, and most of those are culverts and railroad underpasses. There is exactly one three-arch stone bridge left in Iowa. It's Ely's Stone Bridge, on a closed gravel road outside Monticello, and it's the one I keep thinking about.

Here's the part I keep coming back to. The Ely family maintained that bridge themselves for four generations after they built it. Every one of them a mason. That's preservation before anyone used the word — just a family looking after what their people made.

Eventually that ended, the way it does. The county carried it for a while and then couldn't justify it against everything else a county has to fund, and in 2017 the Jones County Historic Preservation Commission took over managing it through the county supervisors. Which is how these things usually go. A structure everybody agrees matters, and nobody's budget it fits into.

So it's six commission members now. Dave Balster and Dean Zimmerman have followed Rose Rohr's leadership and have kept this bridge on an agenda for nine years, chasing assessments and grants and meetings on a structure nobody is making them save. This summer they did the hard, unglamorous thing and paid to find out exactly what was wrong before they asked anyone for a dollar. Now they're going out to raise it.

I want to say something about people like that, because I don't think it gets said enough.

Every historic building still standing in this state has somebody like them behind it. Almost never an institution. Usually a handful of people who decided it mattered and then kept showing up — to the meetings, to the grant deadlines, to the same argument about the same line item, for a decade. Nobody names a building after them. Half the time nobody outside the county knows who they are.

From where I sit I get to see both sides of that. We get called to buildings somebody fought for, and we get called to buildings where the fight started too late, and the difference between those two calls is almost never money. It's whether somebody was paying attention early enough. We wrote up what the assessment found on this bridge, and how this kind of investigation works, if either is useful to you.

One thing before I close it out. The engineer's finding is that this bridge is in poor condition and needs repairs now, and their recommendation to the Commission was to restrict public access until the long-term work is done. There's stone at the faces that isn't attached to anything. Root for this one from a distance — please don't go stand under it.

Now the part I actually want to say.

Not every old building can be saved, and I'd be lying if I told you otherwise. Some are too far gone. Some were never that good to begin with. Telling people that is part of my job and I've had to do it more than once.

This is not one of those. It's the last three-arch stone bridge in Iowa. It's on the National Register. The arches themselves are still sound after a hundred and thirty-three years, and the damage is confined to a band of stone on the outside — which is fixable work, by people who are still around to do it. Some things are worth saving. This one qualifies, and you won't get an argument from me about it.

What it needs now is money. The Commission is out looking for it — six commission members going to grant committees and neighbors and anyone who'll listen, hoping their community gets behind them. If you're in a position to help, whether that's a check, a grant lead, or a call to somebody with more reach than you, this is a good place to put it. There is a 501(c)(3) set up to fund the work — the Natural & Cultural Heritage Foundation of Jones County Area — and donations can be sent to 309 E. 1st Street, Monticello, IA 52310. The fundraising contact is David Balster, at 319-465-4415 or davidbalster@gmail.com.

If the fundraising goes the way everyone hopes, we'll be back on that bridge in the spring. The Elys looked after it for four generations. It'd be an honor to take a turn.

— Josh