The Estherville Swinging Bridge

This suspension footbridge swaying over the West Fork of the Des Moines River was built in nineteen thirty-seven, on the site of an old mill dam. The labor came from the Works Progress Administration, one of the public jobs programs of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which put unemployed men to work during the Great Depression. But the bridge had a practical purpose too.

It is said to have been built so that children on one side of the river could cross safely to reach their school on the other. For more than eighty years it has carried walkers across the water. The city has since restored it, keeping a piece of Estherville's Depression-era history intact.

Today it is lit at night, the lights shimmering on the moving river below.