Bridges Bring Back Memories

By Russell Slaton

The State Highway 198 bridge linking the Payne Springs area and Caney City that was closed in April for its newer brethren is the last of three similar bridges built by the same company in the early to mid-1960s.

They carried what was then Farm to Market Road 90 through cows, pastures and creek bottoms. The new structures soared over the landscape, high enough for the coming Cedar Creek Lake, which was officially completed in 1965.

Norman Slaton of Malakoff was living in Athens when he worked for R.C. Buckner construction company of Jacksonville to build the bridge over Clear Creek. That creek bottom was later inundated by Cedar Creek Lake to form one of its arms. Slaton was a crane operator.

“We had two cranes, one on each side of the bridge, and I operated both of them. If we got into a bind where we had to run both of them at the same time, the foreman I worked for could operate one, too,” Slaton says.

Each bridge slab was 40 feet long, Slaton says. “There weren’t any prestressed beams hauled in there like they do now,” according to Slaton. “When we poured a slab, we actually poured the beams and the slab at the same time. There were forms that were pinned together. We had enough forms, probably four sets, that would let concrete cure, and we could keep on moving across. Two in the middle were curing and one set was in the front, and the one in the rear, we would wreck it out and move it to the front. It was like a set of four dominoes. We’d keep jumping the rear one over, three at a time.”

Slaton says there was a small bridge beside the construction site that carried FM 90, the site of which was later covered by Cedar Creek Lake water. “That was a very small bridge,” Slaton remarks. “It was just a little creek going down through there. It was farmland and mostly pastureland and not many trees.”

After his stint helping build the Clear Creek bridge, Slaton moved north and helped build the original bridge that spanned the Twin Creek arm of Cedar Creek Lake between Payne Springs and Gun Barrel City, which also has been replaced.

In total, Slaton says R.C. Buckner ’s company built three original bridges over Cedar Creek inlets, including the one going over later-inundated Caney Creek between Malakoff and Caney City. All will soon be gone.

Slaton drove over the new Clear Creek bridge when it opened April 3. “I drove across that old one about two days before they shut it down,” Slaton adds.

Slaton says, “It brings back a lot of good memories and I know we have to keep expanding and doing wider roads and stuff, but I really hate to see it demolished. I’ll probably go out there and watch. I might cry when they start busting that thing out.”