Alder Creek Bridge — "Silver Bridge" — homesite of artist Charles Ostner.

Present day residents and visitors flock to the "Silver Bridge" crossing the South Fork of the Payette for numerous water sports opportunities -- swimming, rafting and general water play, but over 140 years ago an artist by the name of Charles Ostner purchased an interest in what had been a toll bridge spanning the river. Some of his most important works of art were made while living along the South Fork.

Charles Ostner was born in Austria, and studied art in Germany, where he was involved in student uprisings during the German revolution of 1848. When the revolution failed, Ostner fled to America, eventually landing in San Francisco, where the gold bug overtook him. Ostner spent a decade moving northward from one gold rush to another. He was on the Fraser River in Canada when he learned of the gold strikes in Idaho. He finally made his way Garden Valley and his silver toll bridge, where he lived for five years.

Ostner devoted four of those years to carving a statue of George Washington from a ponderosa pine tree felled on Alder Creek, a tributary of the South Fork of the Payette River. He carved mainly at night with an ordinary carpenter’s saw and chisel, the light provided by pine-pitch torches held by his children. In 1869, Mr. Ostner presented the statue as a gift to the Idaho Territorial Legislature. Today, the gilded, equestrian statue of General George Washington, depicted at the Battle of Monmouth, is on permanent exhibit at the Idaho State Capitol.