4. Drive across Glass Mill Bridge.

In 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7034, which established the Works Progress Administration (WPA). This New Deal program offered work to millions of Americans unemployed due to the Great Depression. Wages were kept below industry standards, but the WPA helped a lot of families keep bread on their tables. At its peak, it supplied jobs for three million unemployed men and women (but mostly men).

 

It also built up the public infrastructure. The WPA constructed schools, airports, parks, bridges, and 620,000 miles of road. Examples of projects still in use include the presidential retreat Camp David in rural Maryland and LaGuardia Airport in New York City.

 

In Wilmore the WPA funded several improvements, including $25,000 to improve Lexington Avenue in Wilmore. The project added curbs, better drainage, more width, and an asphalt surface. In 1937 Mayor Hugh Sims, Wilmore’s pharmacist, crowed that the city kept several WPA projects “in action” for many years “without adding one cent extra assessment or taxes on the taxpayers.”

 

Local lore says that the WPA also built Glass Mill Bridge. “Buck” West, for example, claimed that he helped quarry “that rock. It was as white as milk, and the water in the creek was so clear and pure then that you could drink right from it.” He continued, “We hauled that rock with an old Model T Ford truck that had a bed with a hand crank. It took us two years, and we sure made a lot of people mad because the road was closed all that time.”

 

West’s 2001 obituary says that the bridge was completed on the day Prohibition was repealed. “We all went to town (Nicholasville) and drank a beer to celebrate,” he was quoted as saying.

 

Unfortunately, that great story is only partly true. WPA workers did do some repairs on the bridge, resealing the surface to keep water from freezing between the rocks. And there was a nearby dam built by New Deal funds (but through the National Recovery Administration, not the WPA) in November 1933 intended to improve fishing for smallmouth and black bass. You can still see it through the trees just a bit up the road toward Wilmore.

 

But the bridge itself was already there. It was probably built in the 1870s, more than half a century earlier.

 

I’ll get back to the bridge in a moment, but first a little history about the mill that gave the bridge its name. Some of the earliest white settlers in Jessamine built the mill possibly as early as 1782, when the Revolutionary War was still raging. Kentucky wasn’t even a state. That first mill ground grain into flour and animal feed.

 

Some decades later Daniel Boone Bryan converted it into a paper mill. Papermaking in the late 18th century was a laborious process. Prior to wood pulp, rags were used to make paper. They were cut into strips, dusted clean, and then transported to the rag engine. This device washed the rags and ground them into a pulp or slurry. Once the proper consistency was reached, the slurry material was drained, put into forms the size of desired sheets of paper, and a pile of these “pelts” were pressed under a large screw. The resulting product went then to a drying room, where it was pressed and tied into reams to be sold.

 

In the nineteenth century the mill began using wood to make paper. Chips were mixed with water until a pulp formed. The pulp was fed into a machine that spread it over a wire mesh to form a thin sheet, pressed the wet sheet to squeeze out water, and then dried in heated cylinders.

 

A man named John Henry Glass reconverted the mill into producing flour. He branded it “Daniel Boone” after Daniel Boone Bryan’s grandmother’s famous explorer brother. (I hear there are still old Daniel Boone flour sacks around. If you find one, let me know!) The new venture became so successful that in 1872 Glass pushed for the construction of a new bridge to accommodate his growing mill.

 

It was the perfect moment to build a beautiful bridge: when stone construction had matured but before iron and steel were being used. Consequently, Glass Mill Bridge features an artisanal quality. Men had to quarry the stone locally, explains developer/historical preservationist Holly Weidemann, which meant that the bridge visually integrated with its surroundings. The bridge was built with “local materials” and was the product of “local craftsmanship.” If Glass had built that bridge just a decade earlier, it would be made of soul-sucking metal and concrete.

 

Unfortunately, Glass’s mill closed in 1907. It could not compete with milling operations nearer railroads. Still, the area buzzed with social activity during the twentieth century. Old issues of the Jessamine Journal speak of lots of fishing, a pool hall, fish frys, church wiener roasts, and “nature” groups (which involved wading and hiking and games and picnic for children).

 

Glass Mill is a beloved site. The Wilmore Free Methodist Church holds baptisms in the water below. One local woman describes learning to swim under the bridge. “The happiest days of my life were spent there wading up and down that creek.” When she got older, she had a wreck in her Honda 50 and got pretty scraped up. A neighbor by the bridge cleaned her up with kerosene and a Band-Aid, but there are still scars. “If I had a choice, I wouldn’t give up the scars because I’d have to give up the memories. When I die, I want my family and friends to stand on that bridge and scatter my ashes into the water there.”

 

Local pride in the bridge can be seen in painting, photographs, and prints. A summer concert series on the Wilmore Downtown Green was called the Stone Bridge Concert series. And the famous photographer James Archambeault immortalized the bridge in his work. You can see a beautiful postcard below.

 

Several of the mill’s buildings still stand. The striking miller’s house, painted in a bluish color, can be seen at the intersection of Glass Mill Rd. and Figg Lane. The stone section was the original mill office. The large two-story frame addition was built in the 1870s. Remains of the mill itself can be seen along Jessamine Creek on the opposite side of Glass Mill Road from the miller’s house.​