The older man at the Historical Society said, Mrs. Brandt, you told my archivist the year 1987. I have been the keeper of that file for a long time. Your Hank did something most people never knew.
I told him about the commissioner on the bridge in his good loafers, the concrete span, the sign they were going to mail me.
In 1987, he said, when your husband restored the Mill Creek covered bridge, he did not just rebuild it. He had it placed on the state historic register, with the help of a letter from Senator Lugars office. A registered historic structure cannot be torn down by a county on a whim. There are hearings, and the state, and it is a long and losing road for any commissioner who tries.
The carbon copy in Hanks cigar box was that very letter, Indiana state seal and all, and the archivist had the matching original on file.
The commissioner called my husbands four years of free weekend work a liability, and the state of Indiana had called it a landmark back in 1987.
The Historical Society sent the county a letter of its own, and the September demolition was canceled before it was ever really alive. A concrete span went in a mile downstream, where the county actually needed one.
Hanks Bridge still stands over Mill Creek, every beam and peg my husband set. The little sign is still at the entrance. And every June, the brides still come to take their pictures there, and I sit on the bench and watch, and I tell anybody who asks whose hands built it.