4. Drive across Glass Mill Bridge.

In 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7034, which established the Works Progress Administration (WPA). This New Deal program employed millions of Americans unemployed due to the Great Depression. Wages were kept below industry standards, but the WPA helped a lot of families keep bread on their tables. At its peak, it supplied jobs for three million unemployed men and women (but mostly men).

 

It also built up the public infrastructure. The WPA constructed schools, airports, parks, bridges, and 620,000 miles of road. Examples of projects still in use include the presidential retreat Camp David in rural Maryland, LaGuardia Airport in New York City, and Glass Mill Bridge in Jessamine County.

 

The WPA project you’re driving across is a four-arch, European-style limestone bridge that spans Jessamine Creek. Built with no mortar, Glass Mill Bridge holds together with just gravity and friction squeezing stones together.

 

It’s a little unclear when the bridge was constructed. Probably sometime in the mid-1930s. One local, who worked on the bridge with his father, offers a more precise date: December 5, 1933. "We finished the bridge the day Prohibition was repealed,” he says, “and the crew rode to Nicholasville and had a beer."

 

The creek below still runs pretty hard. Unless the water is very low, you can still hear the rushing water. That made it a good spot for a mill, and Kentucky’s earliest settlers made one here, perhaps as early as 1782, back when the Revolutionary War was still raging and a full ten years before Kentucky became a state.

 

It began as a grist mill to grind grain into flour and animal feed. Some decades later it was converted into a paper mill.

 

Papermaking in the late 18th century was a laborious process. Prior to wood pulp, rags were used to make paper. They were cut into strips, dusted clean, and then transported to the rag engine. This device washed the rags and ground them into a pulp or slurry. Once the proper consistency was reached, the slurry material was drained, put into forms the size of desired sheets of paper, and a pile of these “pelts” were pressed under a large screw. The resulting product went then to a drying room, where it was pressed and tied into reams to be sold.

 

In the nineteenth century the mill began to use wood. Chips were mixed with water until a pulp formed. The pulp was fed into a paper machine that spread it over a wire mesh to form a thin sheet, pressed the wet sheet to squeeze out water, and then dried in heated cylinders. Glass Mill operated at 72 horsepower.

 

By the twentieth century, the mill could not compete with more powerful milling operations located nearer to railroads. It closed in 1907.

 

Several of the mill’s buildings still stand. The beautiful miller’s house, painted in a bluish color, can be seen at the intersection of Glass Mill Rd. and Figg Lane. The stone section was the original mill office. The large two-story frame addition was built in the 1870s. Remains of the mill itself can be seen along Jessamine Creek on the opposite side of Glass Mill Road from the miller’s house.

 

In 2010 a crane was put on the bridge to remove trees and debris after a flood. The bridge was damaged, and there were concerns about the bridge’s structural integrity until authorities deemed it safe. But it’s a beloved site, especially for the Wilmore Free Methodist Church, which holds baptisms in the water below.