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LA VERNIA – A steel bridge nearly the length of a football field has weathered floods, the South Texas heat and a century’s worth of traffic to survive as a rare engineering marvel of its era and to earn recognition as a Texas and national historic landmark.

The silver and black cast-aluminum sign heralding its historic status lasted two years.

“I just couldn’t believe it,”Shirley Grammer, 68, said. “I cried. You grieve for a few days, then you get mad and get angry about somebody destroying something you worked so hard for.”

Eight years was how long Grammer worked to win the historic designation and the accompanying marker for the bridge over Cibolo Creek at McAlister Crossing, known locally as the Mueller bridge because that’s whose land it crossed.

About two months ago somebody snapped it off and stole it, leaving just a bottom sliver of the marker attached to its still shiny post. Sadly, the loss of the 27-inch-by-42-inch marker is not an isolated incident.

“We hear about them regularly,” said Bob Brinkman, who heads the two-person office in the Texas Historical Commission that reviewed 284 applications for markers last year. “And what we hear about, I’m sure, is just a fraction of what’s happening.”

With some 13,000 markers scattered throughout the state, clearly some get damaged by accident. Others are damaged deliberately.

Just last month, the top half of a marker erected in 1988 at the far southwest corner of Wilson County was cracked off and taken away. The Fairview Community historical marker told the story of a once-thriving cotton-producing town that fell victim to boll weevils after World War I. As the marker noted, Fairview also was the hometown of 20 Texas Rangers, most prominently Frank Hamer, the Ranger who pursued Bonnie and Clyde.

“I’d say three or four times a month we hear about one damaged,” Brinkman said. “I think it’s always been sort of a problem.

“It’s a shame,” said Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt.

He has no leads in either recent case but agrees with Brinkman’s notion that a rise in the value of some metals may have something to do with it.

But Scott Southwell, whose family-owned Southwell Foundry in San Antonio has manufactured the markers for generations, said that while aluminum prices have gone up somewhat, a 35-pound marker at $1 or $2 per pound on the scrap market “is not enough to make it worth stealing.”

“I think it’s just random vandalism,” he said.