Metal truss bridges have a way of catching you off guard. There you are, cruising through the countryside, expecting the usual mix of cornfields and culverts. Suddenly, a lattice rises into view as a reminder that not everything built a century ago has given up the ghost. Delaware County’s Peterson Ford Bridge is one of those surprises.

For decades, the communities of Granville and Albany existed on opposite sides of the Mississinewa River with nothing more than a shallow crossing to tie them together. That isolation finally began to crack in 1901, when a group from rural Niles Township petitioned county commissioners with a clear request: build a bridge at Peterson’s Ford¹. The officials didn’t take the plea lightly. They rode out to the site -named for Jacob Peterson, whose 325 acres stretched along the river²– studied the lay of the land, and launched a formal investigation³.

Once the plan earned its stamp of approval, the county lined up Muncie’s Indiana Bridge Company for the job for $5,500⁴, or about $207,000 today. The new bridge rose over the Mississinewa River in 1902, and company officials proudly dubbed it a “high-triangular⁵” span. Today, we know it by a more technical name: the Peterson Ford Bridge is a Warren polygonal-chord through truss.

That might still sound like a mouthful to anyone who isn’t a full-blown bridge nerd, so here’s what all that technical jargon really means: the Peterson Ford Bridge uses a truss design named after British engineer James Warren, recognizable by its angled supports arranged in a repeating pattern of equilateral triangles. Unlike a standard Warren truss, though, this one has a polygonal upper chord like a camelback instead of a straight horizontal line. When engineers call the bridge a “through truss,” they simply mean that the roadway passes through the structure, like driving through an open-air tunnel of steel.

The Peterson Ford Bridge lasted eighty-one years before significant repairs were needed. In 1983, crews shut it down to give the old span some much-needed care: workers laid a brand-new wooden deck, swapped out aging supports, and installed high-strength stringers between the deck beams⁶. The bridge’s metal grate decking tells the rest of the story. Sometime after that 1983 overhaul -and before the day I first stumbled across it- the 183-foot bridge quietly underwent another round of rehabilitation. More recently, its 17-foot vertical clearance has been artificially reduced to around ten.

Today, crossings like the Peterson Ford Bridge feel out of place since they’re relics of a different era. Metal truss bridges once stitched Delaware County together, but time has thinned their ranks. Discovering one feels a little like stumbling onto a small miracle! As long as the Peterson Ford Bridge remains, though, its silhouette will continue telling the story of a bygone craft that deserves to be remembered.

Sources Cited
1 Ask for a Bridge Over Mississinewa In Niles Township (1901, March 6). The Muncie Star. p. 8. 
2 Griffing, B. N. (1887). Niles Township. An atlas of Delaware County, Indiana. map, Philadelphia, PA; Griffing, Gordon, & Company.
3 (See footnote 1).
4 Bridge Contracts (1901, June 10). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 5. 
5 Peterson Ford Bridge (n.d.). BridgeHunter. Web. Retrieved December 5, 2025. 
6 Hermansen, V. (1984, October 14). Cross With Caution. The Muncie Star. p. 39.