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Preface

Anyone who collects books on covered bridges and watches those bookshelves increasingly sag could legitimately ask, why yet another book on covered bridges? Granted, there are a lot of books.

Only a few combine history, technical aspects, and a survey of existing bridges, the exemplary models being the works of Richard Sanders Allen, whose Covered Bridges of the Northeast, his first book, appeared in 1957. Allen thoroughly researched covered bridge history and technology as well as visited and photographed hundreds of bridges for a set of books that continued until 1970. Most books since then have been limited to states or regions. Joseph D. Conwill’s Covered Bridges Across North America (2004) is an exception.

Many books on any bridge lover’s shelf are essentially photographic anthologies with captions. More recent ones are in full color and make for pleasurable reading. The earliest books devoted to covered bridges include two published in 1931: Clara E. Wagemann’s Covered Bridges of New England and Rosalie Well’s Covered Bridges in America. The first is replete with drawings and etchings as well as a readable narrative focusing on the social and economic conditions. The second is a fascinating photographic anthology of black and white images. Both include many covered bridges now long gone. It is significant that Wagemann’s 1931 book and its revision in 1952 were published in Rutland, VT, by Tuttle, a venerable printing and antiquarian publishing house whose history dates to 1832. In the more than half century since 1948 when the renamed Tuttle Publishing Company was formed, the firm has become the leading publisher of books on Asia. We are grateful that Tuttle is publishing our book, which echoes their pioneering interest in the subject.

Increasing in number are books devoted to the technical aspects of covered bridges, especially bridge trusses. Thomas E. Walczak’s Built in America: Covered Bridges: A Close-up Look (2011) is especially valuable, including as it does numerous drawings from the HAER (Historic American Engineering Record) archive. Related to these are books concerned with timber framing and restoration, such as David Fischetti’s Structural Investigation of Historic Buildings: A Case Study Guide to Preservation Technology for Buildings, Bridges, Towers, and Mills (2009).

What is our claim for more shelf space? While much information on covered bridges is already in print, there is a need for a broader humanistic approach to the covered bridge that includes both historical and technical information as well as a reappraisal of the place of the covered bridge in American culture. We have organized this study into broadly conceived “perspectives”: the covered bridge as a utilitarian object, as indicator of technological ingenuity and progress, as obsolete nuisance, and as a nostalgic icon and symbol of the past. When covered bridges first came to widespread notice in the 1950s, they were still plentiful but being rapidly lost. It was important to catalogue them and begin to understand their history. Sixty years on, our perceptions of covered bridges have changed drastically. While few are now being lost, we are confronted with a new challenge—how to “renovate” without destroying. Today’s engineers and timber framers are highly skilled in (re)constructing covered bridges, but more and more “authentic” historical bridges are sadly being lost to replication. We address this matter head on.

Eight-year-old Terry E. Miller dwarfed by the massive 400-foot-long bridge over the Muskingum River at Conesville, Ohio. (Max T. Miller, 1953)

The co-author’s father, Max Miller, began photographing bridges in 1953 and involved his entire family on this 1960 vacation in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. (Max T. Miller, 1960)

So who is qualified to write such a book? Since covered bridges have no consistent place in academia, we cannot expect any particular group of scholars to step up to the plate. It is also true that today there is a dedicated coterie of covered bridge “enthusiasts,” people who spend goodly amounts of time and money “chasing” covered bridges, as Paul Parrott put it in the title of his 2005 Chasing Covered Bridges and How to Find Them. 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)