McCourtie Park: Seventeen Concrete Bridges

Alongside US Route Twelve in Somerset Center, Michigan, there is a park where a small stream meanders through a few wooded acres crossed by seventeen bridges. Nothing about that description suggests anything unusual. But the bridges are the story.

Every one of those seventeen structures was built around nineteen thirty by two itinerant Mexican artisans named George Cardoso and Ralph Corona, using a technique called el trabajo rustico, a Mexican folk-art tradition in which steel rods are covered in wet concrete and then hand-sculpted to look exactly like wood. The bridges look like rough-hewn timber. They look like logs, planed planks, rope railings, and knotted tree limbs. They are, in fact, entirely concrete. Running your hand along a surface that your eye swears is bark is a distinctly strange experience.

The man who commissioned all of this was William Herbert Lee McCourtie, a lawyer turned cement millionaire who had founded the Trinity Portland Cement Company in Texas and made a considerable fortune. He had grown up in Somerset Center, and in nineteen twenty-four he came back, bought the family homestead and surrounding property, and turned it into a private estate he named Aiden Lair. He intended it as a community gathering place. Henry Ford was among the guests who visited.

McCourtie died in nineteen thirty-three, the same year the Great Depression was at its worst. The estate passed through several hands and eventually became a public park. The county now maintains it free of charge. What survives from McCourtie's vision is essentially the stream and the bridges: seventeen structures spanning a modest waterway in a small Michigan town, each one a piece of folk sculpture masquerading as rustic carpentry. The W. H. L. McCourtie Estate is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is, by any measure, one of the stranger and more delightful things you will encounter on any road in the state of Michigan.