A 1938 WPA footbridge still hangs over the Flint River at Richfield Park

There’s a footbridge in the woods off Irish Road that has been swaying gently over the Flint River since before World War II. It hangs from squat towers of stacked fieldstone, the cables carrying a wooden walkway about 90 feet across the water to join the north and south halves of Richfield County Park. The blueprint for it is dated March 1938, which makes it a genuine piece of Depression-era public works still doing the job it was built for.

The whole park is older than that. Genesee County bought the first parcel here on October 10, 1935 — the very first piece of land in what is now the largest county park system in Michigan, measured by acreage. With the country deep in the Depression, the Genesee County Road Commission sponsored a Works Progress Administration project to build it out. WPA crews cleared the brush, leveled the rough ground, and put up bridges for both cars and walkers, picnic shelters, tennis courts, and stone cooking stoves.

Some of that 1930s handiwork is still standing. A few of the original picnic shelters use whole tree trunks and branches for their posts — rustic on purpose — and the suspension footbridge remains the park’s signature, an unusual enough design that it draws people who collect old bridges the way others collect lighthouses.

Today the park spreads across more than 340 acres with trails, ballfields, and river access for paddlers. But the thing worth walking to is still that bridge: stone towers, steel cable, wooden planks underfoot, and the Flint River sliding by below — built by men who needed the work in 1938 and used most days since by people who have no idea what it cost to put there.