This card in the "Red Back" set carries another captioning error. There isn't any "Rock Creek" in Salem. If there were, you'd be visiting www.rockcreek.com. That is, of course, Brock Creek. The bridge itself is a two-lane affair perhaps 50 feet long. It may not seem like much to you, jaded as you are by the Golden Gate and the Verrazano Narrows bridges, but a steel-reinforced poured concrete bridge was still something of an engineering marvel when this card was printed before 1910. (Another landmark in rebar history: Harvard Stadium, built in 1903 and famed in widely distributed postcards as "the first large-scale use of reinforced concrete.")
One other feature of the photo is worth mention. You can see underneath the bridge a wooden fence, put there to keep the Elrods' cows out of Walter Mead's garden -- at least that was the purpose another fence served 50 years later, when I crossed the bridge twice a day to and from school.
The card was mailed on August 12, 1909 to Albert Markley, Huntingburg, Ind. The message reads: "I wish you would send me a quart of Fortuna. Frank." Exactly what that might have been I have no idea. These days Google will tell you that Fortuna is either a town in California or a soccer club in Denmark, but this card makes it sound more like something to eat, or perhaps drink? (9/6/02)
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