Walk the Border-to-Border Trail west from Mill Creek Park this month and the path just stops. Gravel, a chain-link gap, a contractor's silt fence where the boardwalk should keep going toward Grand Street. If you've lived in Dexter through this construction season, you've probably assumed it's one more permit delay, one more line item stuck in a county budget meeting.
It isn't. What's actually missing is a specific, 135-year-old iron bridge that spent 28 years sitting on a riverbank because nobody could find it a river the right size.
Why the Trail Still Stops at Grand Street
The gap is the last unfinished stretch of a project called the Dexter Connection, a roughly 0.7-mile segment of the Border-to-Border Trail on the west side of the city. According to the trail's own project updates, the route starts at the Miller-Smith Preserve near Parker Road and Dexter-Chelsea Road, crosses Dexter-Chelsea Road at a set of flashing pedestrian beacons, then runs cross-country before landing at Mill Creek Park near the end of Grand Street.
Most of that stretch is dirt and drainage work, the unglamorous part of trail building. The part that's actually holding up the calendar is the crossing over Mill Creek itself, which depends on a bridge that has been waiting for this exact job since before most of the current construction crew was born.
The Bridge That Was Too Short for Its Own River
That bridge is the Bell Road Bridge, a Pratt through truss built in 1891 by the Wrought Iron Bridge Company of Canton, Ohio. It's 103 feet 6 inches long, 13 feet 5 inches wide, resting on fieldstone abutments, and it once carried Bell Road over the Huron River near the site of Dover, a mill settlement that Judge Samuel Dexter and Isaac Pomeroy started in the 1830s and that has since all but vanished. When the iron bridge went up in 1891 to replace an aging timber crossing, the Dexter Leader called it "one of the finest iron bridges in the county."
It stayed in service for over a century, surviving a 1992 collision that closed it briefly and a subsequent weight limit that kept heavy trucks off it. In 1997, the Washtenaw County Road Commission took it out of service for good. It didn't get scrapped. It also didn't get reinstalled. It sat on the Bell Road riverbank for more than 20 years, because the crossing it needed to serve had outgrown it.
Roy Townsend, project manager for the Washtenaw County Parks and Recreation Commission, explained the mismatch plainly in an August 2026 interview on WEMU's Issues of the Environment:
"It no longer spanned the Huron River because now, it's only 103 feet long. We need a lot longer bridge, so it was set aside and trying to find a location."
The Huron River had simply gotten wider, or the engineering standards around it had, and a bridge that once counted as one of the finest in the county was now too short for the job it was built to do.
A Bridge Meets Its Match
In 2018, the Road Commission and Washtenaw County Parks split the cost 50/50 to do something with the bridge rather than let it rot. They hired a historic bridge restoration firm based in St. Johns, Michigan, to disassemble it piece by piece, label every part, and move it to storage in Holt.
For years, that's where it stayed. Then, according to Townsend, someone working on the Border-to-Border Trail's Dexter segment had an idea: Mill Creek is a lot smaller than the Huron River. A 103-foot span that couldn't cover the Huron might be exactly right for Mill Creek.
It worked. The bridge is now being rebuilt as the centerpiece of a new 364-foot, four-span structure at the Dexter Connection crossing, with the historic 1891 truss carrying pedestrians and cyclists over the middle stretch of the creek. The mismatch that stranded it for 28 years turned out to be the reason it fits its second river.
| Original crossing (Bell Rd over the Huron) | New crossing (B2B Trail over Mill Creek) | |
|---|---|---|
| Bridge role | Full span, retired 1997 | Centerpiece of a 364-ft, four-span structure |
| Fit | Too short for the river's needs | Matches the 103-ft, 6-in original span |
As of an early August 2026 update from Townsend, restoration work at the St. Johns shop was about 90 percent complete, with crews fitting rivets, tightening connections, and painting the truss before trucking it down to Dexter in pieces later that month.
What Changes Once It's Actually in the Ground
Once the crossing is finished, the Dexter Connection will let anyone on the west side of the city walk or bike from the Miller-Smith Preserve straight into Mill Creek Park and downtown without touching a road except at one signaled crossing. That links up with trail sections that already exist between Dexter-Huron Metropark, downtown Dexter, Mill Creek Park, and Hudson Mills Metropark, closing one of the last gaps in a corridor that already runs for miles along the Huron River watershed.
Townsend told WEMU the segment is expected to be finished this fall. It's worth holding that date loosely. A separate boardwalk repair project in Dexter-Huron Metropark, closed since April 20 for rotted decking, was originally expected to reopen by mid-June and didn't actually reopen until mid-July. Public trail schedules in this county have a way of drifting a few weeks past the original estimate, and there's no reason to assume this one will be different.
The Rest of This Year's Orange Barrels
If it feels like Dexter has been under construction all year, that's not just the trail. The city resurfaced Main Street from the Mill Creek bridge to Baker Road this summer, with substantial completion set for August 5, deliberately timed to clear the contractor out before the Dexter Summer Festival. Separately, the Washtenaw County Road Commission closed the Island Lake Road and Dexter-Chelsea Road intersection in early May to build a roundabout, reopening it on August 28.
Both of those projects are done now. The bridge is the piece still finishing, tucked at the far end of Grand Street where most people driving through downtown never see it.
There's something fitting about a bridge that spent nearly three decades waiting for the right river finally getting installed the same year the rest of the town's construction wrapped up. It's not a metaphor anybody needed. It's just how this particular piece of infrastructure happened to work out, a truss built for wagons hauling grain from a mill town that no longer exists, now carrying whoever's out for an evening walk between the preserve and the creek.
We keep an eye on these small, unglamorous changes because they're part of what makes Dexter worth paying attention to, not because we're trying to sell you on anything today. If you're curious about how a project like this fits into the bigger picture of the neighborhoods we work in, or you just want to talk about what's happening around town, Charles by Reinhart is always happy to schedule a consultation and talk it through.
