in the United States and Canada, it is necessary to consider all wooden bridges, whether covered, uncovered, partially covered, or even those blending wood and iron.
Covered bridges as defined above are not unique to North America. Historically speaking, the covered bridges of central Europe and southern China have much longer histories than those considered here, but the North American (hereafter “American”) covered bridge appears not only to have developed independently of these older traditions but along a radically different path.
What makes this so is not the phenomenon of having covers but the nature of the wooden trusses that supported the bridges. Indeed, Chinese covered bridges (langqiao, meaning “corridor bridge”) have no trusses in the conventional sense, their support being provided beneath the deck and built to accommodate only pedestrians, animals, and small carts (Knapp, 2008). European bridges appear to have originated during medieval times, only developing into vehicular bridges after several hundred years. Their truss systems are mostly unlike those that were developed in the United States. From the beginning, American covered bridges, on the other hand, were intended for vehicular traffic such as wagons, as well as for pedestrians and animals, yet in time they came to include use by even railroad trains and canal boats. Several European countries are known to have built wooden rail bridges but mostly under American influence, while China never had covered bridges carrying trains or boats. While wooden truss bridges, covered or uncovered, did not originate in the United States, the designs that emerged of such bridges were uniquely American.
Luzerne, Switzerland’s Spreuerbrücke, spanning the River Reuss, although built in 1566 by Kaspar Meglinger, exemplifies the Medieval bridge technology of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Besides having a chapel midstream, there is a series of sixty-seven paintings under the roof painted between 1626 and 1635 depicting “The Dance of Death.” (Terry E. Miller, 1974)
Spanning the River Ilm in the village of Buchfart, Thuringia, Germany, this two-span bridge was built around the year 1817. Each span uses a queenpost truss with a clear span of 53 feet of a total of 123 feet. (Philip C. S. Caston, 2004)
Unidentified Austrian bridge with castle above as photographed from a moving train by the co-author’s father. (Max T. Miller, 1980)
The Santiao Bridge in Taishun County, Zhejiang Province, People’s Republic of China, straddles a rock-strewn chasm. It was built in 1843 on the site of nearby older bridges that helped link the stone-lined footpaths in this remote area. (A. Chester Ong, 2007)
Seen from beneath, the Santiao Bridge is lifted by major and minor timbers that are woven together to raise the structure some 10 meters above the streambed. (A. Chester Ong, 2007)
It is commonplace to describe “the past” as simple, uncluttered, and stress-free. We are inclined to idealize the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as slower paced and more personal, and believe that the absence of distractions such as telephones, audio systems, computers, and traffic congestion made life more relaxing and peaceful. The European immigrants who arrived at various places on the eastern coast of North America in ever greater numbers during the seventeenth century were confronted with a relatively pristine natural environment but had enormous challenges ahead of them. Except for Indian trails, there were no roads through the vast forests or over the mountains. Even in 1837, when English civil engineer David Stevenson traveled throughout the eastern United States and published his Sketch of the Civil Engineering of North America, the American road system was deplorable. Writes Stevenson: “Road-making is a branch of engineering which has been very little cultivated in America, . . . direct[ing] their whole attention to the construction of canals, as being much better adapted to supply their wants.” And also: “The roads throughout the United States and Canada, are, from these causes not very numerous, and most of those by which I travelled were in so neglected and wretched a condition, as hardly to deserve the name of highways, being quite unfit for any vehicle but an American stage, and any pilot but an American driver. In many parts of the country, the operation of cutting a track through the forests of a sufficient width to allow vehicles to pass each other, is all that has been done towards the formation of a road” (1859: 131–2). Besides the mountains and endless forest, there were rivers and streams of all sizes, from the mighty Delaware River to minor rivulets. With or without roads, travelers had only two ways to cross these waterways: by fording or by ferry.
The old Miller Ferry crossed Alabama’s Tallapoosa River before a covered bridge was built. Its peaceful appearance belies an exceptionally violent battle fought here on March 26, 1814 when troops under General Andrew Jackson fought the Red Stick tribe of the Creek in a war for control of much of the South. Jackson’s troops, aided by a rival tribe, killed nearly 800 of the 1,000 Red Stick warriors, a tragic event memorialized in a national park. (Horseshoe Bend National Military Park)
Even as late as 1797, famed American portrait painter Charles Willson Peale warned: “Easy and safe passages over the waters of the United States are much wanted—even our post roads are deficient; often the affrighted traveller stops, and surveys the turbulent torrent that hides an unknown bottom, he hesitates—doubts whether to risk a passage or not; at last, by delay grown impatient, he with fear and trembling cautiously moves forward and perhaps arrives in safety on the opposite bank; but alas! Too frequently the rash, or fool-hardy driver, is carried down the stream, and all is lost!” (1797: iii).
Fording was only possible when water levels were low enough and the stream bed solid enough to support hooves or wagon wheels. This could change suddenly after a hard rain, making travel extremely unpredictable.
Since deeper and wider rivers, especially the broad estuaries of the great rivers approaching the sea, could never be forded, toll ferries appeared when individual proprietors found it possible for them to be economically viable. When the water level was too high, too low, too swift, or the river was frozen, ferry services usually ceased operation, leading citizens to wish for a better solution—a bridge.
Peale also commented on this matter: “Legislatures, and you men of influence in the counties of each State! Turn your attention to this important object—shorten the distance to market for the sale of the product of your lands. I offer you a cheap and easy mode of building Bridges, the principles of which are so simple, and the mechanism so easy, that any ingenious man may execute them” (p. iii).
Even then, of course, humankind already had long and extensive experience building bridges. European immigrants to America knew bridges from home and had doubtless crossed many in their lifetime. But standing there on the wooded shore of one of America’s wild and hitherto unbridged rivers, they had to determine for themselves how to get people, animals, and freight across safely. Some of the pioneers knew stone masonry and wood joinery from the “old country,” principally parts of the British Isles or one of the German-speaking areas of central Europe. Few, however, had experience building bridges.
Stone arch bridges typified the English solution to crossing rivers, but they were expensive and slow to build. Seen here is one half of a two-span bridge over the River Tees leading to the twelfth-century Barnard Castle in England’s County Durham. (Terry E. Miller, 1987)
Looking about,
