Black Hollow Coal Company Bridge

My former boss would always hit me with the comment "even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes" when I finally did something right!

The old saying "better lucky than good" seems to come into play often.

Steve--good thing you got your photos of the abutment and piers because tonight's local paper had photos of a contractor working on the south bank. The contract calls for them to remove the old substructure elements, fill in any air shafts that still exist, and level off some more of the slag pile. A lot of the slag pile was used to fill in the area where the old railroad bridge south of the present river bridge was removed in the 1980's, but they want to level off more of it. Over the years there were three different coal mining companies active in the area.

This bridge belonged to the Black Hollow Coal Company which was located on the north side of the Vermilion River. In May 1913 robbers stopped the wagon delivering the payroll to the mine, killed the men delivering it, and fled with the money. They were eventually arrested and sent to prison.