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Juday Creek crossings in Clay and Harris townships · a NAMED GAP for the per-structure succession
The crossings of Juday Creek are fixed in the record by the creek's own science before they are fixed by any bridge roll. The U.S. Geological Survey's 1993–94 sediment study of the creek (Fowler and Wilson, WRIR 95-4135) worked six measuring sites, and its site descriptions name the road crossings reach by reach: Site 1, the most upstream, northwest of the intersection of Bittersweet and Cleveland Roads; Site 2, near the intersection of Douglas and Fir Roads; Site 3, just upstream of an instream pond in the Grape Road commercial development area near Grape Road and Douglas Road — ground "recently converted to a commercial and business area" from agriculture when the study was made; Site 4, near the intersection of Douglas Road and Maple Lane, upstream from the Douglas Road bridge, with a wetland area upstream of that bridge; and Site 6, within the Izaak Walton League property, between Darden Road and the Indiana Toll Road, bordered on the west by the St. Joseph River. The Warren Golf Course reach adds the crossings of the golf-course ground: the creek bisects the course in Township 38 North, Range 3 East, section 30, bordered by Ironwood Road on the east and Interstate 80/90 — the Toll Road — on the north, and the 1997 relocation rebuilt the channel there (Shirey et al., 2016). The Notre Dame ECI account adds the repair geography of 2013: grant-funded rebuilding of parts of the creek "near the east side of Indiana 933 and the Toll Road, as well as the section between Ironwood and Douglas" (John Law, county surveyor's office).
The crossings the audit row names — Grape Road, Gumwood Road, State Road 23, Cleveland Road, Douglas Road — exist as road crossings of the creek on the road network the study sites describe. What the open record does not give, for any of them, is the succession the row asks for: no build date, no rebuild date, no structure type, no National Bridge Inventory number was retrievable for a single Juday Creek crossing. The searches ran whole: Bridgehunter and HistoricBridges.org for Juday Creek and St. Joseph County structures; the Indiana Historic Bridge Inventory (Vol. 4, county section) for a historic crossing at any Juday site — none is listed in the results reached; the St. Joseph County Road Commission's bridge inventory (a county "Bridge List" PDF exists on the county roads site, but its contents were not retrievable in text form); and targeted searches on the creek's name with each named road. The structural reason is itself a finding worth printing: many Juday Creek crossings are culverts and short spans below the National Bridge Inventory's 20-foot reporting threshold, so the creek's crossings largely live below the floor of the national roll that records successions for larger bridges.
The gap is therefore named, not papered over: the dated succession of bridges and culverts at each major Juday Creek crossing (Grape, Gumwood, SR 23, Cleveland, Douglas, and the Toll Road) is settled by the INDOT National Bridge Inventory extract for St. Joseph County, read with the St. Joseph County Highway Department / County Surveyor bridge inspection files, which hold the sub-NBI structures the national roll omits. Until that extract is read, the honest crossings article is the inventory above: the creek's crossings are located and landmarked by the 1993–94 study, the 1997 relocation, and the 2013 repair record — and their succession is a named gap with its settling source named.