For second time in 91 years, woman cuts ribbon to open Spottsville Bridge

SPOTTSVILLE, Ky. − On Dec. 17, 1931, the responsibility for cutting the ribbon at the dedication of the U.S. 60 Spottsville Bridge over the Green River — described in press reports at the time as “magnificent” and “imposing” — was entrusted to the tender hands of two 5-year-old girls, Irma Stanley and Susan Langley.

Fourteen years later, they returned as young women for a repeat performance to celebrate the bridge being “freed” — having its tolls discontinued.

On Wednesday morning, the cycle was completed as 95-year-old Irma Stanley Day came home to cut, with the assistance of Gov. Andy Beshear, the ribbon on the new and much wider $32.2 million Spottsville Bridge that will soon replace its 91-year-old predecessor.

Mrs. Day’s appearance was a highlight of Wednesday’s long-anticipated celebration of the new bridge that is more than twice as wide as the 1931 model, which has long been decried as too narrow for modern vehicles.

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The lanes on the old bridge are only 9 feet wide each with just a few inches of shoulder. The 1,103-foot-long bridge is listed by the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet as “structurally deficient and functionally obsolete.”

The new 1,143-foot-long bridge boasts two 12-foot lanes and two eight-foot emergency shoulders for stalled vehicles or first responders. It also features a wider, 560-foot main span to better accommodate barge traffic approaching and departing the nearby Green River Lock and Dam No. 1.

The new bridge is expected to open to traffic by the end of this month. Remaining work includes painting the upper portion of the steel truss and striping the bridge deck. The bridge will partially open while the final work to connect it to the new alignment is being completed.

Crews will be on site in September to remove the old bridge and the old portion of the roadway.

“Travelers will have a brand-new bridge that meets modern design standards and will turn daily commutes into safer, more enjoyable rides,” Beshear said during Wednesday’s ceremony. “This is a heavily agricultural area, and the new bridge will make life easier for farmers who will have a more direct route to drive their equipment without stopping traffic in both directions when they pass through.”

The new bridge’s distinctive Wildcat blue color was selected by residents from a list of approved colors as part of a social media voting contest hosted by Henderson County Judge/Executive Brad Schneider.

“For a dozen reasons, the construction of the new Spottsville Bridge is such a boon to Henderson County, with safety being chief among those,” Schneider said Wednesday.

“I know this project was a long time coming, and the former and current leadership at the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet deserve our thanks for finally getting it done,” he said. “But probably the man who needs the most appreciation is former state representative Dr. David Watkins, who just about single-handedly negotiated the bridge into the state road plan in 2012. He should consider this a terrific legacy of his service to our community.”

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“The completion of the new, much wider and safer Spottsville Bridge is a great transportation improvement for Northeast Henderson County,” state Sen. Robby Mills said. “It has been my privilege to help keep this project in the road plan for the last six years. This bridge could help further open up northeast Henderson and western Daviess County to more industrial development in the future. Congrats to all those who built and managed this fine project.”

Old bridge was once prized

Yet for all the relief that it will soon be replaced, it’s hard to overstate how the original highway bridge across the Green River was celebrated when it opened in late 1931.

The Spottsville Bridge — officially, the Richard W. Owen Bridge, named for an Owensboro man who was an early member of the Kentucky Highway Commission — came shortly after the dawn of America’s modern highway system.

The numbering of U.S. highways (including U.S. 60 itself) had taken place just five years earlier, when many of the routes were mere dirt paths or, at best, gravel roads. (A 1929 state highway map classified U.S. 60-East as “well-maintained earth.”)

Further, with the opening of the Spottsville Bridge, “every stream that crosses U.S. Highway 60 between Ashland and Paducah is now girded with steel and concrete spans for vehicular traffic,” in the nearly breathless words of The (Owensboro) Messenger-Inquirer.

And the Spottsville span was the first modern highway bridge over a river to open in Henderson County or even in this region. The Audubon Memorial Bridge that would carry U.S. 41 traffic across the Ohio River (and is now the northbound Twin Bridge) didn’t open until July 4, 1931, while the Cary Glover (aka, “Blue”) Bridge across the Ohio at Owensboro opened in 1940.

A large crowd turned out for that 1931 dedication of the bridge; The Messenger-Inquirer estimated their number at nearly 2,000, while The Gleaner put the crowd size at 4,000.

Notable among the attendees was Lt. Gov. A.B. “Happy” Chandler, a native of Corydon, who spoke and officially accepted the bridge on behalf of the people of Henderson County and Kentucky. He recalled that when he first moved to Central Kentucky 14 years earlier, he had to cross the Green River at Spottsville by ferry.

There was much pageantry: A parade and banquet in Henderson and, at the dedication, the singing of “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Dixie,” an invocation and benediction and, of course, much speechifying.

But the privilege of cutting (or, in the parlance of the day, “parting”) of the ribbon fell to two little girls related to men who were magistrates on either side of the bridge. Irma, who grew up on a farm between Reed and Beals, was the niece of Magistrate George Stanley while Susan, who lived on the Spottsville side of the river, was the daughter of Magistrate Sam Langley. Irma cut a ribbon on the eastern end of the bridge while Susan did the same on the western end.

At age 95, Irma Stanley Day is of sound mind (“I asked God to let me keep my mind,” she said during an interview at the home of her niece Charlotte Royer in Henderson on Monday, surrounded by family).

But, she said, “I really don’t remember cutting the ribbon at that bridge.” She was only five years old, after all.

Connecting families

But Mrs. Day certainly has memories of the bridge itself. “That bridge connected my two families,” her father’s Stanley family on the Reed side of the Green River and her mother’s Green family on the Spottsville side, she said.

The privilege of crossing the bridge came at no small cost during those Depression years. The toll for an automobile was 55 cents — about $11 in today’s dollars — while the toll for a ton-and-a-half truck was 85 cents, The Messenger-Inquirer reported at the time.

But a person could walk across the bridge for a nickel, which is what Irma did all those years while attending Spottsville School.

While it was considered a sizable bridge by 1930 standards, “I considered it a narrow bridge then because I didn’t like heights,” Mrs. Day said. The deck of the bridge stood more than 80 feet above the Green River at normal pool stage in those days.

“When I walked the bridge, I walked down the center line” avoiding the edge where she might spy the river far below, she said.

One winter day, Irma’s father was driving the family across the bridge, but when he applied his brakes as he approached the toll house on the eastern approach of the bridge, his car skidded partway down an embankment beside the road. Though they were well clear of the river, she remembers her father saying, “Don’t anybody move!” They waited for someone to pull them back onto the roadway.

Although young Irma and Susan didn’t know one another at the time of the 1931 bridge dedication, they ended up going to school together at Spottsville School, from which Irma graduated high school in 1944.

“I ended up rooming with her for half a year” at Western Kentucky State Teachers College (now Western Kentucky University) in Bowling Green, Mrs. Day said.

Irma and Susan were brought together again for the ceremony celebrating the “freeing” of the Spottsville Bridge on Aug. 25, 1945, one of eight state bridges across Kentucky from which tolls were removed that day. By then, more than 2.9 million vehicles had paid tolls to cross the Spottsville Bridge.

Though she was by then an adult, Mrs. Day doesn’t remember much about that ceremony, either. “It was a busy time in my life,” she explained. She had graduated high school and hoped to study to become a nurse and enlist in the Army. But then her mother died, and her father prevailed on her to study at Western, closer to home.

There, famed basketball coach E.A. Diddle introduced Irma to one of his former players, Bill Day, and a long-distance courtship ensued while he served in the Coast Guard. Memories of cutting a ribbon at the second bridge ceremony paled compared with what else was going on in her life.

In the years that followed, vehicles such as school buses, semi-trailer trucks and farm equipment grew considerably in size, so meeting oncoming traffic on the Spottsville Bridge long ago took on a sense of some peril.

The construction of a modern bridge has been on the community’s wish list for decades. The span was designed and engineered by Stantech, while C.J. Mahan Construction Co. awarded the construction contract. Construction began in 2020.

A family friend learned of the new bridge and informed Irma Stanley Day. A great niece, Hannah Hudson of Henderson, contacted Herbie McKee, a distant cousin, about Irma’s connection to the Spottsville Bridge; McKee in turn got in touch with Dorsey Ridley, a former state legislator and aide to Gov. Andy Beshear, setting the stage for her return this week from her Florida home.

“I’m a dreamer,” Mrs. Day said with a twinkle in her eye. “… I said, ‘I can just see me: They’re going to call, and I’m going to be on a helicopter and they’re going to lower me down to cut that ribbon!’”

That didn’t come to pass exactly as she had playfully fantasized. But she’s certainly clear-eyed about why she was chosen for the ceremony.

“It’s based on, I’m still alive,” Mrs. Day said matter-of-factly.

Ninety-one years after that first ribbon-cutting, “It’s a miracle I’m still here,” she said. “God planned it. Every time He opened a door of service, I went through it. Because He’s on the other side.”

This article originally appeared on Henderson Gleaner: Spottsville Bridge opened by Irma Stanley Day, age 95