Covered Bridges
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Joseph D Conwill
Photographer and historian Joseph D. Conwill has been interested in covered bridges since 1966. He has seen every covered bridge in North America, including nearly two hundred that no longer exist. He is editor of Covered Bridge Topics, the quarterly magazine of the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges. His photographic work is included in various collections, including the National Archives of Canada.
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Covered Bridges - Joseph D Conwill
READING
This lovely covered bridge in the Gatineau Valley of Québec is just a few miles north of Canada’s capital city of Ottawa, Ontario.
INTRODUCTION
THE OLD COVERED bridge is a powerful symbol of American rural life. The timber tunnel, fragrant and mysterious, carries the traveler safely over a gurgling stream, along the road from bright green fields to cool shady woods. This dreamworld image does not always match reality, but it comes close often enough to make covered bridges among the most popular symbols of Americana. They are also very accessible symbols, being found in most parts of the United States except for the High Plains and the Rockies, and in much of eastern Canada as well.
The redevelopment of the rural economy as a suburban one, based on travel to jobs elsewhere, has made covered bridge preservation more difficult. Most covered bridges as originally built could have carried heavy loads such as school buses, fire engines, or oil trucks on an occasional basis, but the bridges suffered from decades of neglect which weakened many of them early in the twentieth century. Until the 1960s the common expectation was that the covered bridges would eventually all be replaced with concrete, and many did not receive even routine maintenance. Since then, their popularity has inspired various efforts to keep them in service, although the vastly increased traffic volume on rural roads brings special challenges in dealing with one-lane bridges. Bypassing them is a possibility, but all structures need repairs now and then, and it is often hard to find funding for repairs unless the bridge is still carrying traffic.
The historical period of covered bridge construction lasted from about 1805 to 1955. In the northeastern United States no new covered bridges were built after World War I. Construction in the Midwest lasted into the 1920s, and in parts of the South into the 1930s. In the Pacific Northwest, and also in parts of eastern Canada, where large supplies of high quality timber were still locally available, covered bridge construction lasted into the 1950s. The later covered bridges were built for automobile traffic from the very start. The United States still has 674 covered bridges from this historical time period, although over a third of them have been significantly modernized. Canada has 144, and more of them are original because on average they are more recent.
The former Columbia–Portland Bridge over the Delaware River between New Jersey and Pennsylvania shows the mystery of the long, timbered tunnel. It was an excellent example of the Burr truss type of construction.
The popularity of the covered bridge concept inspired several thousand imitations from the mid-1950s onwards. Most of these were mere decorative shells erected over concrete bridges, or structures built of small dimension lumber in backyards. They obviously had no relation to the historical prototypes other than as testaments to their popularity, but guidebooks and press accounts often cited them as if they were real. This explains the wild misstatements still frequently encountered that there are over eight hundred, or fifteen hundred, or even three thousand covered bridges in the United States, for by now the modern imitations greatly outnumber the originals, just as recent suburban houses of colonial
style outnumber real colonial-era dwellings.
From the late 1960s onwards, a greater awareness of historical building techniques led to the construction of a few new covered bridges that closely resembled the old ones. At first they were all-new road crossings, or else replacements for old covered bridges that had been accidentally lost to