Just north of today’s gravel driveway into historic Mary Olson Farm, Green River Road once turned sharply to the east, crossed over Olson Creek, looped around the farm’s south meadow and rejoined the road as it is known today.

Today, the only way to reach the farm’s south meadow from the farm is to wade through salmon-bearing Olson creek.

Among the waders are farm cows Libby and Annabelle on their way to munch and the 8,000 middle-schoolers who visit the farm every school year.

To allow the kiddies and the farm’s livestock to make the crossing without getting their tootsies wet, by the end of next summer, the White River Valley Museum expects to build over Olson Creek a 40-foot-long, 5-foot-wide bridge made of hollow core concrete slab covered with rough sawn planks.

“The Olsons used to have a little wagon bridge over the creek. We’d like to recreate what was once there; that’s our charge,” said Patricia Cosgrove, curator of the White River Valley Museum. “If everybody stands on a little foot bridge, they will not trample local plants. We treat Olson Creek with a lot of reverence. Under our care, we have made it much more healthy, with an increase in the number of salmon.”

The 67-acre Mary Olson Farm site, a city owned park, is on the east side of Green River Road, north of the Auburn Golf Course.

Cosgrove said the drawn-out process of obtaining permits and all the various permissions from local and state agencies pushed construction beyond the late summer, Sept. 15, 2015, construction window, so construction has been moved to the summer of 2016. That’ll be in time to meet attendees at next September’s Hops and Crops Festival at the farm.

JP Rupert Engineering volunteered its services for the design work. The City of Auburn has issued a Mitigated Determination of Non-Significance (MDNS) for the project.

The zoning on the property is public and quasi-public, which permits parks and park facilities.

The bridge squares with the zoning designation, but it must also be reviewed for consistency with all building, environmental, floodplain and stormwater regulations.