While some enthusiasts do contribute articles to publications, no one has been inclined to take on the daunting task of making sense of covered bridge history and technology on a North American scale. Indeed, it could be asked if anyone is capable of taking on such a challenge. While constantly aware that we “do not know everything,” we also understand that “if not us, then who?”
Primary author, Terry E. Miller, is a retired professor of Ethno-musicology, a field devoted to the study of music around the world, at Kent State University in Ohio. His work over the past forty plus years has focused on the music of Mainland Southeast Asia, primarily Thailand and Laos, while having a second major interest in orally transmitted psalm and hymn singing spanning the British Isles, North America, and the English-speaking West Indies, and a third interest in Chinese music. It is reasonable to ask, how is an ethnomusicologist qualified to write on covered bridges?
Miller was born and raised in Dover, Ohio, a town of about 10,000 in east-central Ohio. His interest in covered bridges developed because his late father, Max T. Miller (1916–2009), purchased a Leica M-2 camera in 1951 and decided to shoot pictures of a few of the known covered bridges in nearby counties, especially Harrison and Coshocton. His home county, Tuscarawas, had lost its last covered bridge by 1947, long before anyone in the Miller family was aware of such structures. At age eight, the author began appearing in his father’s photographs, though having little appreciation of the significance of covered bridges.
One experience, however, did leave an indelible impression: walking through the 400-foot Conesville Bridge spanning the Muskingum River south of Coshocton, whose overwhelming width and height dwarfed the young boy. He also vividly recalls meeting the by-then long retired “Mad Marshall” Jacobs, once a notorious steeplejack and “flag pole sitter.”
In 1956, Miller’s father began systematically photographing the covered bridges of Ohio, and in 1959 expanded into Pennsylvania. By 1962, however, coinciding with the younger Miller’s acquisition of a driver’s license, his father had lost interest, leaving the zeal for covered bridges to his son. Since then, Miller has continued visiting, measuring, and researching nearly 1,000 covered bridges, most in the United States, but including four in Switzerland, around fifty in Canada, and over forty in the People’s Republic of China. During his years of college and graduate study (1963–75), including two years in the military (1968–70), covered bridge research sometimes had to wait, but in 1966 he managed to draft his first book, The Covered Bridges of Tuscarawas County, Ohio, which was self-published in 1975 but had been researched in the early 1960s. He also escaped from his studies at the College of Wooster (Ohio) during 1966–7 to research the covered bridges of Coshocton County, which was published in 2009 as The Covered Bridges of Coshocton County, Ohio: A History. Spanning this time, he also published numerous short articles in several covered bridge magazines, built a number of balsa wood scale models of particular bridges, and around 1960 won a “superior” in a state-wide science fair for a study of covered bridge trusses that included scale models.
Ronald G. Knapp also is a retired professor, but of Cultural and Historical Geography, at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Over the past forty plus years through some twenty books, numerous articles, and many lectures throughout the world, he has analyzed, celebrated, and promoted an understanding of China’s architectural heritage. In recent years, his research and writings have broadened to include the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia and America’s covered bridges.
Born in Pittsburgh, Knapp saw his first covered bridge in the early 1950s in the counties north towards Erie as he visited an old farm owned by a family member. No photographs were taken and memories are only hazy. In 1955, his family moved to south Florida, a state without historic covered bridges but with many folly bridges built more for decoration than function. When he moved to New York in 1968 to begin his college teaching career, he found that the college was just four miles from the bypassed Perrine’s Covered Bridge, the second oldest in the state. His Historical Geography course often focused on the evolution of transportation in the local region. These tentative forays pale in comparison with Terry Miller’s ongoing and extensive investigation of covered bridges throughout North America during the same decades.
Knapp’s wide-ranging field work throughout rural China documenting vernacular architecture led to researching and photographing old bridges, including increasing numbers of covered bridges. While several articles and a small 1993 book on Chinese bridges were published, it was not until 2005 as a participant in a Chinese conference devoted to newly discovered covered bridges that his focus began to change seriously. It was fortunate that accomplished photographer, A. Chester Ong, attended the conference with him. After traveling nearly twenty times together to remote areas of China and Southeast Asia, they have collaborated on four award-winning books. In 2008, they published the first comprehensive book in English about Chinese bridges, among the least known and understood of China’s many wonders. Chinese Bridges: Living Architecture from China’s Past was listed as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 by Choice magazine. This book is the model we have used as we have written and illustrated America’s Covered Bridges: Practical Crossings—Nostalgic Icons.
It was purely by chance that in early 2005 Miller unexpectedly learned of the existence of Chinese covered bridges while traveling to a music conference in Fujian Province, China. Later that year, he was able to visit two Chinese counties to see China’s marvelous langqiao (“corridor bridges”), but it was not until 2007 that he met Knapp and Ong at the 2nd International Conference on Chinese Lounge [Covered] Bridges in Shouning County, Fujian Province, China.
Miller visited Knapp at his home in New York in 2008, and they spent two days visiting covered bridges there. While traveling, Knapp proposed that the two write a comprehensive book on American covered bridges, with Chester Ong’s gorgeous photography taking center stage.
Since late summer 2010, the three have managed ten bridge shooting trips covering selected areas of the United States and Canada in pursuit of this goal.
This book has no intention of being “everything about covered bridges” or “the last word” on the subject even as its heft suggests significant comprehensiveness. We see the book, instead, as a reconsideration of the subject and offer a few new ways to view these utilitarian objects that have now become nostalgic icons. We provide also enough information about research resources to make this book and its associated website a starting point for further work by a new generation of bridge scholars.
Co-author Ronald G. Knapp with photographer Chester A. Ong at a village bridge in China’s Shouning County. (Terry E. Miller, 2007)
Co-authors Miller (left) and Knapp (center) with photographer Ong (right) at Grafton County, New Hampshire’s Swiftwater Bridge. (Sara Stone Miller, 2010)
Ong, Knapp, and Sara Stone Miller pause for lunch at Covered Bridge Pizza, North Kingsville, Ohio, inside a portion of Ashtabula County’s former Eagleville Bridge. (Terry E. Miller, 2011)
New Perspectives on North America’s Covered Bridges
Just think about it: you can still drive over (or, more properly, through) an all-wood covered bridge constructed as many as 180 years ago before bridge builders had even explained mathematically how bridges work. Over these years, the American covered bridge has passed through a series of phases, from its beginning as a common utilitarian river crossing to become a principal icon for an imagined, romanticized, and nostalgic past. As our perceptions have changed, so have our attitudes towards everything that affects the life of covered bridges, including “progress,” preservation, and re-imagination. While
