Brush Creek Bridge (Rainbow Bridge)

Route 66 spends only about 13 miles in Kansas, across the corner of Cherokee County through Galena, Riverton and Baxter Springs. The concrete road it followed was built in the early 1920s to tie those mining towns together, and with it came three bridges of a design that James Barney Marsh, an Iowa bridge designer, had patented in 1912. Marsh spent the next two decades building about 70 of his rainbow arches across the Midwest, most of them in Kansas, where about 35 still stand. The patent called for sliding plates where deck met beams, so the concrete could expand and contract with heat and wet.

This one, 130 feet long, went up over Brush Creek in 1923 and carried Route 66 traffic until the road was bypassed in the 1960s. When Interstate 44 opened in 1961 it ran straight from Oklahoma into Missouri and missed Kansas by about a quarter mile. In the early 1990s the other two Marsh bridges on the Kansas stretch, over the Spring River and Willow Creek, were taken down. In 1992 the Kansas Historic Route 66 Association worked to save this one. A new bridge was built just to the east for local traffic, and the old span, on the National Register since 1983, was repaired by the association and the county and later with National Park Service grant money.

You can still walk or drive across it, on a short spur off the county road about three and a half miles north of Baxter Springs.