225BatonRouge.com

People like to name their bridges.

There’s a bridge in Hungary, for example, where voters got to pick the name. No fewer than 11% voted to name it the Chuck Norris Bridge after the American TV actor, who happens to be hugely popular in that country.

Here in Baton Rouge, few people seem aware the I-10 bridge downtown, the one many people still call “the new bridge,” already has a formal name. It’s the Horace Wilkinson Bridge.

“Every few years, someone comes up with the idea to name that bridge, but it already has one,” says Ann Wilkinson, the niece of Horace Wilkinson III, who along with his father and grandfather was honored with the naming of the I-10 bridge back in 1968.

That fact hasn’t stopped various lawmakers from unwittingly trying to name it, including state Sen. Cleo Fields, who a few years ago took a crack at naming it after Martin Luther King Jr.

It’s named for three generations of Horace Wilkinsons, who served a total of 54 years in the Louisiana Legislature. Of them, Act 206 of 1968 Legislature stated: “These gentlemen served diligently, contributing greatly to the betterment of the state … the new bridge over the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge will provide a new and vital link between the state capital and the parishes which these gentlemen so ably represented.”