The Fern Knoll Bridge
For about ten months, families could not drive in to visit the graves at Fern Knoll Burial Park. The stone bridge over Toby Creek was the only way in, and it had given out. RBR Earthworks was one of the contractors on the effort that reopened it.
Fern Knoll Burial Park sits in the Back Mountain, off Midland Drive in Dallas Township. Thousands of people are buried there, including hundreds of veterans. The bridge carrying the entrance road over Toby Creek was reported to date to around 1910.
On Friday, April 11, 2025, it failed. Local coverage reported the collapse happened as a truck crossed, and that the cemetery caretaker believed erosion under the structure was the cause. Nobody was hurt. But the only way to drive into the cemetery was gone.
What followed was ten months without vehicle access. Misericordia University borders the property and opened a temporary walking path near McGowan Hall, but the walk was long and the ground is not flat. News crews covered families who could not reach graves over Easter and again on Memorial Day, when a cemetery that normally sees steady traffic sat nearly empty.
This was not a job about equipment. It was about a road that thousands of people needed back.
A failed span, a live creek, and a bridge worth keeping
The road surface had broken through into the creek. Old asphalt, concrete, timber and stone were down in the channel, and Toby Creek was still running through it. Any work here had to be planned around the water, the permitting that goes with a Pennsylvania waterway, and a stone structure over a century old that nobody wanted to lose.
The approach was to carry the creek through large-diameter pipe set below the roadway, rather than tear out the historic arch and start over. That decision is the reason the bridge still looks like the bridge.
Big pipe, set low, backfilled and armored
The failed material came out and went off site. New corrugated HDPE culvert was set into the channel on a prepared bed, joined, and brought to grade. HDPE was the right call for a stream crossing that is going to sit wet for the rest of its life. It does not rust, and the joints do not need the kind of mechanical connectors that eventually leak.
Once the pipe was in, the excavation was backfilled and compacted in lifts, the outlet was armored with heavy stone to stop the same erosion that took the original structure out, and the driving surface was rebuilt in stone over top.
- Removal of the failed roadway and debris out of the creek channel
- Excavation and bedding for large-diameter HDPE culvert
- Pipe set, joined and brought to grade below the historic stone arch
- Backfill and compaction in lifts, with the original parapet walls preserved
- Heavy stone armoring at the outlet to control future erosion
- Stone driving surface rebuilt and graded for vehicle access
This one took more than one outfit
RBR Earthworks was one of several parties on this project, and it is worth being straight about that. State Rep. Brenda Pugh credited the reopening to a coordinated effort among Dallas Township, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, RBR Earthworks and the H&K Group, with residents and local businesses contributing to the cemetery fund that paid for the repair.
Permitting for work in and around a waterway ran through DEP, with the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission and Luzerne County also involved. Bruce and his crew handled the earthwork and the pipe.
Open again
The bridge reopened to vehicles in February 2026. Newswatch 16 was there and filmed visitors driving across and into the cemetery the same afternoon. One woman told them she was going straight over to tell her ninety-year-old mother she could finally get back in to see her parents, her brother and her sister-in-law.
RBR does driveways, drainage and site work across Northeastern Pennsylvania. Most of it is somebody's yard or somebody's job site. This one was different, and it is the one we would point at first.
Reported locally
Culverts, drainage and driveway access
Got a culvert, a washout, or a driveway that water is taking apart?
RBR Earthworks handles culvert installation, drainage correction, driveway reconstruction, excavation across Northeastern Pennsylvania. Bruce comes out and looks at the job himself.