Time running out for Liberty’s historic Trinity River bridge

By Vanesa Brashier, editor and publisher of Bluebonnet News

There are certain things in a community that you come to believe will always be there. For Liberty, one of those things has been the old three-truss Parker bridge stretching across the Trinity River.

For nearly a century, those steel trusses have been part of our landscape, so familiar that most of us probably stopped giving them much thought. They were simply there, part of what home looked like for generations of people in and around Liberty.

Sometime in 2027, we are going to have to learn what that view looks like without them.

Built around 1930, the bridge is scheduled to be taken down just a few years shy of its 100th birthday. I have thought for years that this day might come, but I always hoped somehow the old bridge could be spared.

For much of the last three decades, the bridge mostly just sat there. It was not forgotten by the people of Liberty, and over the years, there were informal assurances that it would be preserved. Many of us believed that somehow a way would be found to save it.

Those assurances were never fulfilled.

Perhaps there was once a window when something could have been done. If so, that window has closed. Years of deterioration have made the options fewer and the price of preservation far greater than it once might have been.

Today, restoring the bridge would cost upward of $20 million. Even saving one of the three trusses and relocating it somewhere in Liberty would cost around $1 million. Neither the City of Liberty nor Liberty County has that kind of money available, and any TxDOT funding used for preservation would ultimately take away from money needed for road and highway projects.

I understand the reality of the situation but that does not make it any easier to accept.

We are losing more than an old piece of steel. We are losing something that has been part of Liberty’s identity for generations.

Think of all the people who have crossed the Trinity beneath those trusses. Children rode across in the back seats of their parents’ cars and later drove their own children across. People traveled over the bridge on their way to work, school, church, weddings, football games and funerals. Some crossed it leaving Liberty for someplace new. Others saw those familiar trusses ahead and knew they were almost home.

Most of those trips were completely ordinary. But that is how a landmark becomes part of a community. It stands quietly in the background while we live our lives around it.

I have my own story with this bridge.

Back in 2000, before the days of Facebook, I belonged to a journalism chat group on Yahoo, where I met my husband, John, who had earned his journalism degree from Stephen F. Austin State University. We talked about current events, newspapers and eventually the old bridge in Liberty. I had written a few articles about it and told him some of its history.

John became curious enough to drive to Liberty to see the bridge — and to meet me.

We met for the first time on that bridge in 2000 and began dating that night. Twenty-six years later, we are still together.

I love that our story began there, but ours is only one of countless stories attached to those old trusses. Somewhere there are family photographs with the bridge in the background. There are people who remember crossing it with parents and grandparents who are no longer here. There are generations of Liberty County residents who probably never imagined there would come a day when it would be gone.

Its removal will also mean losing its listing on the National Register of Historic Places. That hurts, too. There is something special about having a piece of our little corner of Texas recognized as significant to the larger history of this country.

I wish this story had a different ending. I wish the bridge had been given another purpose years ago, before deterioration and restoration costs made preservation practically impossible. I wish we could save even one truss so future generations could see a piece of what once spanned the Trinity.

Wishing cannot turn back the clock.

What we can do is make good use of the time we have left. Take photographs. Find the old pictures tucked away in family albums. Ask parents and grandparents what they remember about the bridge. Write those stories down.

For nearly a century, the old Parker bridge has stood over the Trinity while Liberty changed around it. In 2027, it will be our turn to watch the landscape change.

I wish we could save the bridge. Since we cannot, I hope we at least do a good job of remembering it. I know I will.