Featured Posts News — 05 October 2011
Seventy years after constructing the former Eton-Rugby bridge, 93-year old Dryden resident, Owen Fenwick was the first to drive across the new structure, breaking the riibbon.
Fenwick was awarded a job on the construction of the former bridge in 1941, also the year of his wedding to Mary.
Fenwick is the only living member of the 1941 bridge crew, and was hired with his brother-in-law Tom Griffith.
“The steel beams that we had were 65 feet long and we drove them down until we hit rock. There wasn’t a truck in the country that could haul anything that long,” said Fenwick. “CPR brought it in the fall, and we unloaded it on the spur. There was a guy who had a three ton truck so we got two sets of sleighs. We put one on the front and one on the back. They had cables cross-ways through and when you came to a corner, one would turn and it would turn the other sleighs out.”
The newly constructed bridge holds beams that are 42 metres long, with a total expanse of the bridge being 56 metres, according to Carlo Cantera of Engineering Northwest Ltd.
Fenwick remembers the company trying to convince the supervisor to fire him and Griffith, as they were both single at the time they started the job.
“You have to let these guys go, there are lots of married family men that need jobs,” said Fenwick, relaying the words of the company.
The men had just finished building another bridge further down Eton-Rugby, and the reply of the boss was,?“To hell with you, I’ve spent months trying to teach them how to build a bridge, they know. You think I’m going to teach somebody else how to build the other one? No way.”
Fenwick married his wife Mary on May 15 that year, and was given two days off to celebrate his nuptials.
“When we got done with the other bridge, the boss said ‘we got four or five boxes of dynamite and caps, how are we going to get them over to this bridge?’ I had a Model A then, and I said put them in my car, I’ll take them over,” said Fenwick. “I’ll never forget, we were coming down the highway and there was a woman I?knew walking and I stopped to offer her a ride.”
“She opened the door and I?told her she had to sit on the box of dynamite. You could hear her scream for half a mile. She was back up the road at a run! She wouldn’t even ride with me.”
Fenwick left bridge construction, opened and closed a service station, and proceeded to further his farming career.
Purchasing milking cows, Fenwick followed that path for two years, then sold the herd, as he felt too restricted to the farm.
“I sold the cows and bought a bulldozer, a grader and a truck and trailer and I bulldozed probably 90 per cent of the farms around here clearing land,” said Fenwick. “I made $10 an acre.”
Following some government funding, the construction on the current bridge started May 5, 2011 and will be complete this month.
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