The hammer came down on the first peg of the morning, driving it through two overlapping planks of white pine and into the one beneath, binding three layers of wood at a crossing point that was one of hundreds like it spreading across the surface of the truss. It was one of thousands of pegs the carpenter would drive that week, and one of tens of thousands he would drive before the bridge at North Blenheim was finished. He used a wooden mallet. Then he moved to the next position in the lattice and drove another peg.

The motion was not complicated. Peg. Mallet. Surface.

He had been repeating it since before the sun had fully cleared the walls of the valley to the east, and he would keep at it until the light failed or the foreman called the crew down from the staging for the evening. Tomorrow he would climb back up and resume where he had left off. The Schoharie Creek ran beneath him in its spring flow, cold and clear, carrying the last of the snowmelt down from the Catskill Mountains twenty miles to the east. He could hear it through the gaps in the staging planks.

The structure rising above him that spring stretched two hundred and thirty-two feet from the face of one abutment to the face of the other across the open water of the Schoharie. It was the longest single span of a covered wooden bridge ever attempted anywhere in the United States, and one of the longest single spans of its kind ever built in the world. The man driving pegs into the lattice planks above a mountain creek in upstate New York in the spring of 1855 was building something that had not been built before, in the sense that he was building it to a length none of its predecessors had reached. He had no way of knowing this in any form that would have changed the nature of his day.

He knew his work. Peg. Mallet. Surface of the plank.

Next position. He knew the sound of the creek below and the cold of spring mornings in the Schoharie Valley before the sun crossed the eastern ridgeline, when the temperature at the bottom of the valley stayed low until mid-morning even in May. He knew the foreman, the schedule, and the wage he was paid for that day. What he was building, in the larger sense of what it would become in the historical record, was not his to know.

To understand why the people of Schoharie County needed to cross the Schoharie Creek at North Blenheim badly enough to pay for a structure of this size, you have to know what the Schoharie Valley was like in 1855, and what the creek meant to the people who tried to use it as part of their terrain rather than as an obstacle across it. The Schoharie runs roughly ninety miles from its sources in the eastern Catskills to its junction with the Mohawk River near Fort Plain in Montgomery County. It drains a basin of about nine hundred and forty square miles of Catskill foothills and valley farmland, a region that was transforming through the first half of the nineteenth century from old-growth forest into dairy farms, grain fields, and orchards that would define Schoharie County’s agricultural economy for the rest of the century. The valley bottom along the creek was the most productive farmland in the county.

The roads that ran beside it connected farms to mills and market centers and to each other through a series of crossings that worked when the creek cooperated and did not work when it did not. The creek did not always cooperate. A mountain stream draining a basin of thin soil and fickle Catskill weather does not hold a predictable level. Spring thaw in the Catskills could raise the Schoharie by feet within hours when temperatures climbed quickly after a heavy-snow year.

Summer thunderstorms over the Catskill Plateau, capable of dropping several inches of rain in a few hours on a basin already saturated from earlier weather, produced sudden rises that caught people at the creek crossings when the water was still low and the sky above still showed the character of the storm rather than its results. The shallow fords at the main crossings were the first answer to the crossing problem, and they were an answer tied to a permanent set of conditions. A ford worked when the creek was low enough to cross at a suitable depth without sweeping away a horse or a loaded wagon. A ford did not work when the creek ran above that level.

The level was not fixed from season to season. A dry spring might leave the creek fordable into June. A wet spring might make the ford impassable from snowmelt into July. Farm operations on both sides of the creek did not organize themselves around the availability of the ford.

They organized themselves around the requirements of the farm and left the crossing problem to be solved when it came time to reach the junction. Ferreys at the main crossings offered an alternative to the ford when the ford was impassable. At the cost of a fare, a boat, and the time to complete the crossing under the control of one man whose judgment of safe conditions did not always match the judgment of the party waiting on the bank with a time-sensitive load. The ferry capable of carrying a wagon and its team required a sturdy flat-bottomed boat and a crew able to work it against the current that ran in the Schoharie Valley at the levels where the ford was most likely unusable.

The ferry and the ford were not a permanent solution to the crossing problem. They were a recurring solution. The covered wooden bridge at North Blenheim was not the first fixed crossing at that site. Earlier bridge structures had been built at or near the North Blenheim site in the decades before 1855.

Records of those structures are partial, and what the records reflect is that the earlier crossings had not solved the problem to the county’s satisfaction, whether through flood damage, structural deterioration, insufficient span, or a combination of these. The bridge the county of Schoharie contracted for was intended to be a permanent solution to a crossing that had resisted permanent solutions. The tradition of covered wooden bridges in the northeastern United States by 1855 was a tradition roughly three decades old in its modern form, beginning with the construction of the first significant covered bridges in Pennsylvania and New England in the 1820s. The cover over the bridge structure, the wooden roof and side walls that enclosed the truss, was not an aesthetic choice in the way that ornamentation in a Victorian house was an aesthetic choice.

It was a response to a specific durability problem. A wooden truss exposed to direct weather in the northeastern states deteriorated at a rate that made a twenty-year service life an optimistic expectation and a fifteen-year service life a reasonable one. Rot crept in through the exposed end grain of large wooden members and through surfaces that held moisture after rain. The freeze-thaw cycle worked on the joints while the sun dried surfaces and caused them to check, opening paths for moisture.

The cumulative effect of northeastern weather on unprotected wood was a systematic degradation that no maintenance regime could fully stop. A covered and side-protected wooden bridge lived three to five times longer than an unprotected structure of equivalent materials, according to the experience of the bridge-building economy that had been making that comparison since the 1820s. The cover added material cost and labor cost to construction, but it converted a structure requiring rebuilding every two decades into a structure that could serve its crossing for sixty to eighty years with ordinary maintenance at a total cost over that period that town accountants could calculate against the alternative of building the same bridge three times. The structural system inside the cover of the Blenheim Bridge was a lattice truss, a design patented by the New Haven architect Ithiel Town in 1820.

Town had arrived at the lattice design as a solution to a problem that was not primarily structural but practical. The bridge-building technology available in the northeastern states in the early 1820s depended on heavy timber framing traditions, in which the structural members of a truss were large beams and posts and diagonal braces connected at mortise-and-tenon joints requiring skilled craftsmen to execute properly. The skill requirements of the heavy timber truss were an obstacle in rural areas where skilled carpenters were scarce or expensive, and an obstacle in production wherever the volume of bridge building exceeded the supply of professional carpenters able to execute joinery to specification. Heavy timber also required massive materials.

The principal members of a wooden truss spanning eighty or a hundred feet had to be large enough in section to carry bending loads, and durable timber in the northeastern states was not uniformly available in those sizes at every site requiring a bridge. Town’s solution was to eliminate the massive members and the complex joints entirely. The lattice truss used ordinary planks one and a half to two inches thick, materials available at any sawmill in the northeastern states at customary prices. The planks were placed diagonally across the depth of the truss, intersecting each other at roughly forty-five degrees, with the intersections fastened by wooden pegs driven through both planks at the point of crossing.

A second layer of planks was laid in the opposite diagonal, crossing the first layer and completing the X pattern that gave the lattice its structural character and its name. The lattice derived its strength from distributing the load across hundreds of small members rather than concentrating it in a few large ones. A single plank in the lattice carried a small fraction of the total load on the structure. If that plank cracked or split, or if a wooden peg loosened at one of its intersections, the load was redistributed to the adjacent planks without catastrophic consequences.

The lattice design was tolerant of variations in materials and workmanship that were unavoidable when building with local timber and local carpenters. Town priced this advantage precisely. His standard license arrangement was one dollar per linear foot of bridge length for builders who negotiated the license in advance. The alternative price for builders Town or his agents discovered using the lattice design without a license was two dollars per linear foot.

Town spent a considerable portion of his career traveling through the bridge-building regions of New England and New York identifying unlicensed lattice bridges and confronting builders with the financial consequences of not having paid in advance. The two-dollar rate functioned as a penalty and as an incentive for future compliance, and the records of Town’s inspection tours indicate that the incentive worked incompletely but persistently in the bridge-building economy of the northeastern states. Nicholas Montgomery Powers was born in 1817 in Pittsford, Vermont, a town in Rutland County in the Otter Creek valley on the western slope of the Green Mountains. The Green Mountains to the east provided the timber that mills cut into planks used by the valley’s builders.

The rivers running down the Green Mountain slopes toward Otter Creek and Lake Champlain were of the same class of mountain streams as the Schoharie. Variable, capable of flooding, requiring crossings that fords could not reliably provide. Powers learned the bridge-building trade in Vermont, apprenticing in the methods of covered wooden bridge construction that were developing throughout New England and New York since the early years of the century. No precise details of his apprenticeship survive in publicly available sources.

What the records of his career show is that by his late twenties he was building covered bridges across river crossings in Vermont and upstate New York on his own account. By the time he was contracted for the Schoharie crossing in the mid-1850s, his completed work was sufficient for the county to trust him with the longest bridge he had yet attempted. Powers was not a formally trained engineer. He had no university degree or institutional qualification in any discipline that mid-nineteenth-century practice would have recognized as the science of engineering.

He was a builder in the practical tradition of the trade, a man who learned what a wooden structure could carry and how it must be built to carry it through the experience of building wooden structures and observing their performance under load and their modes of failure. He knew the Town lattice as one knows a system one has used repeatedly to achieve results one can predict within the range of one’s experience. What the Schoharie crossing asked of him, at two hundred and thirty-two feet, was an extension of that range. The two-hundred-and-thirty-two-foot clear span in a Town lattice truss was not a simple extension of the typical lattice openings of the 1850s.

The most common covered bridge openings in New York and New England at the time ranged from eighty to one hundred and sixty feet. A single two-hundred-and-thirty-two-foot opening required the lattice to carry a relationship between load and span that had not been tested at this range in existing American construction. The depth of the truss, the vertical distance from top chord to bottom chord, had to be proportioned to the span length to maintain sufficient rigidity under the moving load of a heavy wagon crossing the bridge. At a span of two hundred and thirty-two feet, the required truss depth reached nearly twenty-eight to thirty feet.

A truss as tall as a three-story building running the full length of the bridge. Powers set a truss depth within that range. This proportion was not derived from formal structural analysis in the mathematical sense. Powers left behind no set of calculations showing how he arrived at the dimensions he chose.

What the dimensions themselves show, given that the bridge stood for one hundred and fifty-six years under loads that increased significantly over that period, is that the proportion was sufficient. He arrived at correct proportions without the formal analytical tools that would have allowed a later generation of engineers to calculate the answer from first principles. He arrived at them the way Latrobe arrived at the thickness of the foundation pier in Raleigh twenty years earlier, through the accumulated judgment of a builder who had watched wooden and stone structures long enough to know, within a learned margin of confidence, what was sufficient. The abutments were built first.

The bearing surfaces that would receive the ends of the two-hundred-and-thirty-two-foot trusses had to be set at the correct elevation and alignment before the temporary staging went up and before truss assembly began. The abutment stone came from the limestone formations of the Schoharie Valley, Devonian carbonate rocks underlying the valley floor and lower valley walls throughout the county. Limestone splits with greater predictability along its bedding planes than the Maryland Piedmont granite. It is a workable stone for rural masonry, quarried by men who understood its nature and shaped by masons who had worked with it in the valley for decades.

The abutment builders laid their stone in hydraulic mortar that cured to a compressive strength sufficient to carry the load the lattice trusses would impose on the bearing surfaces. The abutment construction was the work that had to be complete before the carpenters’ crews could begin the temporary work over the creek. The temporary work was the timber staging that would support the lattice trusses during assembly. A Town lattice truss is not a self-supporting structure until the lattice panel is fully complete and the wooden pegs are fully seated in place.

Before that point, the lattice planks are a collection of timbers arranged in a pattern with no structural integrity without support beneath it. For a two-hundred-and-thirty-two-foot span, the staging in the channel of the Schoharie Creek was a substantial temporary structure in its own right. Timber posts driven into the creek bed, capped with horizontal frames, rising to the level of the bridge’s bottom chord, spaced at intervals providing support for the growing truss without allowing any unsupported length between supports to exceed what the unfinished bridge could carry. The staging was work that had to be done in the creek, whatever its conditions, in the season when the Schoharie’s level dropped enough to allow work in it.

This staging was also the work the Schoharie could destroy. A rise in the creek during the construction period, before the bridge superstructure was complete and the staging removed, was a risk the construction schedule had to account for. The seasonal window for work inside the Schoharie was the period when its level dropped reliably, from late summer into autumn, before the spring thaw. Any construction schedule that left the staging in the water through the flood season was a schedule gambling against the creek.

The timber for the lattice planks came from the Catskill forests. The Catskills in the mid-1850s still held large stands of old-growth white pine and hemlock, first-growth timber of the Northeast that had been cut from coastal areas and lower Hudson Valley lands over the previous century but remained standing in the interior highlands of the Catskills. Old-growth white pine in 1855 was a material different from the young-growth pine the sawmills would produce within a generation. The fibers were dense, the growth rings tight, formed over centuries rather than decades.

The wood was heavy and saturated with resin in a way not found in younger, faster-grown material, and that resin content contributed to its durability under the moisture-fluctuation conditions inside a covered bridge. The sawmills supplying the bridge timber operated in the creek valleys adjacent to the Catskill forests, using water power from the same mountain streams that fed the Schoharie. The timber reached the construction site by horse-drawn wagon down the valley roads from the mills, a journey measured by the limits of what a team of horses or oxen could haul in a day over the condition of Schoharie Valley roads in the 1850s. The construction crew Powers assembled at Blenheim was the region’s carpentry workforce, men from Schoharie County and the neighboring counties who possessed the basic carpentry skills the lattice required and could be hired by the day or by the piece for the duration of the construction contract.

The skilled element of the crew, the men who had worked with Powers on earlier bridge contracts and knew the lattice sequence and quality standards, formed the core around which the local labor was organized. The local men followed the instructions of those who had done this work before. No labor records of the bridge construction survive in a form identifying individual workers below the level of the responsible contractor. Schoharie County’s accounts from the construction period record the cost of the project as a series of separate line items.

The construction contract. The timber. The carpentry. The hardware, with the hardware item covering the pegs, iron fittings, and wooden dowels.

The carpentry item covers the wages of the men who drove those pegs. The names of those men exist in that item at the level of detail preserved by the accounting of a small rural county in 1855. The wooden pegs were the fasteners that bound the lattice together. Every intersection of two layers of lattice planks required a single peg, a round wooden dowel about one inch in diameter, long enough to penetrate all the lattice layers at that point, and set or expanded at each exposed end to prevent the peg from slipping.

The pegs were typically cut from locust or another dense hardwood that resisted crushing and splitting better than the pine of the lattice planks. A peg well driven and fully seated in a tight hole creates a virtually rigid joint under the slight deflections the truss undergoes in loading. A peg not fully driven leaves a gap between it and the plank surface, allowing the crossing planks to move partially against each other under repeated loading and unloading of the truss as traffic passed. A lattice with a large number of joints loosened in this way loses the cumulative effect that gives it its load-distributing property.

The structural degradation resulting from insufficiently driven pegs was not sudden. It was gradual, proceeding along the path of the weakest joints. The construction superintendent at Blenheim was the person responsible for the quality of those joints. This responsibility was not merely technical calculation.

It was hands-on inspection. Was the peg seated flush with the surface? Was the expansion at the end complete? Was there light showing between the peg and the bearing surface in the plank?

It was an inspection that had to be performed for every peg driven across the two-hundred-and-thirty-two-foot length of a truss with two faces. The number of wooden pegs in the Blenheim Bridge ran into the thousands. The number of inspection motions required to verify them was in the same range. The Blenheim Bridge was a double-lane structure, containing two roadways under one roof, wide enough for two loaded wagons to pass each other inside the bridge without one having to wait at the entrance until the road was clear.

This double width was unusual in covered bridge construction. Most covered bridges in New York and New England were single-lane structures sufficient for only one vehicle. The double width at Blenheim reflected the volume of traffic expected at this crossing. A single-lane bridge at a busy crossing during the autumn harvest season, when loaded grain wagons headed from both sides of the creek to the mills, created congestion at each entrance that slowed the valley’s commerce at its most time-sensitive period.

The double width required a wider roof structure, wider sides, and a heavier floor, and all that additional material constituted additional dead load carried by the abutments alongside the live load of traffic. The abutments at the Blenheim Bridge were built to carry both. The additional proportion in depth and material required by the extra dead load was built into Powers’s design. Whether he calculated it or estimated it with the judgment of a man who had built in this tradition long enough to know what was sufficient, the result was the same.

The structure he built carried what was placed upon it for one hundred and fifty-six years. The bridge was completed and opened to traffic in 1855. As for any formal ceremony attending its opening, none is recorded in the sources in a way that made it prominent to the public. What the records document is the completion of the structure and the beginning of its function.

The wagons, carriages, and farm teams of Schoharie County began crossing it. What the Blenheim Bridge carried over one hundred and fifty-six years of service was the full course of a rural New York economy in transition. The farm wagons of 1855 gave way to heavier vehicles during the agricultural modernization of the turn of the century. Automobiles began using a bridge designed originally for horse-drawn loads.

Automobiles grew heavier as the decades passed, and the farm trucks that replaced the horse-drawn wagons were heavier still. The load on the lattice trusses increased gradually year by year, not in sudden leaps testing the structure’s limits in a single event, but in the slow accumulation of a technological century placing increasing weight on a structure built for the technology of 1855. Schoharie County’s maintenance crews worked on the bridge according to cycles appropriate to a covered wooden structure in a northeastern climate. The roof covering was the first line of defense and the first component needing periodic renewal.

The side sheathing protecting the inside of the trusses from weather needed attention on cycles determined by degree of exposure and quality of the original material. The floor planks, receiving the direct load of traffic and the direct contact of wheels and hooves, were the component consumed at the fastest rate and requiring the most frequent replacement. The lattice truss members behind the sheathing were what the cover protected, and in well-maintained covered bridges, they were the component least subject to deterioration. At the Blenheim Bridge, those members were made of old-growth Catskill pine that the carpenter had been pinning over the temporary staging in the spring of 1855.

The bridge survived the floods of the Schoharie that tested it over those years. The creek flooded on its mountain schedule, in harsh springs, wet summers, and the periodic storms that pushed the watershed past its seasonal levels, while the bridge stood above those events at the elevation Powers chose, above the flood lines the valley’s experience had identified as relevant design events, absorbing the hydraulic load on the abutment faces without moving, and resuming its function as the water receded. The most prominent flood in the historical record before Hurricane Irene came as the harshest test the bridge faced in its working life in 1914, when the Schoharie rose to levels the valley had never recorded in the period of reliable measurement. Water reached the lower portions of structures along the banks in the North Blenheim area.

It did not reach the bridge deck. The truss was above the flood level. The abutments absorbed the hydraulic load and transmitted it to the Schoharie Valley limestone without moving. When the flood receded, the bridge was intact.

County road crews cleared debris from the approaches and service resumed. The creek returned to its normal level. The lattice trusses continued to carry everything Schoharie County moved across them. The National Register of Historic Places added the Blenheim Covered Bridge to its list in 1970.

The National Historic Landmark designation came in 2003. The landmark documentation recorded the bridge as the longest single-span covered wooden bridge in the United States and one of the longest surviving structures of its kind anywhere in the world. The documentation recorded Nicholas Montgomery Powers as the bridge’s builder. It recorded 1855 as the year of construction.

It recorded the span and truss dimensions and the structural system that made the bridge what it was. The carpenters who drove the wooden pegs through the lattice planks in the spring and summer of 1855 appear in the landmark documentation at the same level the Schoharie County accounting of 1855 preserved them, as a cost of the construction project, not as individuals within it. The man who drove the peg at the start of this narrative, working on the lattice above the spring creek, moving from position to position, driving it again, is present in those documents as a monetary amount in the carpentry labor line item. His name does not appear in the landmark designation in any form made available to the public.

This is not unique to the Blenheim Bridge. This is the state of the historical record for construction workers in rural nineteenth-century America. The responsible party appears in the contract. The engineer or principal builder appears.

The individual carpenters and laborers, below the level of the responsible party, appear if at all as aggregate entries. A certain number of men for a certain number of days at certain wages. The work is counted. The men are counted as a cost of that work.

They are not counted as people. On the morning of August 27, 2011, the Schoharie Valley was at the end of a dry summer. The creek level was low. Soil moisture in the Catskill watershed was below seasonal average.

Stream gauges recorded low water values. The Catskills to the east were covered in the usual late-summer vegetation, over terrain that had absorbed the season’s modest rainfall without generating runoff beyond what the stream channels could discharge in their normal flows. Hurricane Irene reached the North Carolina coast and moved northeast along the Atlantic coast during August 27. The storm carried late-summer Atlantic moisture over the Catskill Mountains through the night of the twenty-seventh and the morning and afternoon of the twenty-eighth.

The rainfall totals over the Catskill watershed during those twenty-four hours exceeded any values recorded in the history of modern measurement for the region. The watershed was dry when the rain began. The dry soil absorbed the first drops. As the rain continued at rates exceeding the soil’s absorption capacity, surface runoff began moving from the steep Catskill slopes into the tributary streams, and from them into the Schoharie Creek, and the Schoharie began to rise.

The level rose through the evening of August 27, through the night, and into the morning of August 28. The flow gauge at Prattsville, upstream of North Blenheim, recorded levels exceeding any previous reading in that station’s history. The water carried debris from the upper valley, trees, timber, building materials from structures the flood was destroying in Catskill towns, plus vehicles, fuel tanks, and everything a raging flood collects as it passes through populated areas at the speed and volume that Irene’s flood generated. The floodwater reached the North Blenheim crossing and rose against the faces of the Blenheim Bridge abutments.

The masonry placed by the valley’s builders in 1855 withstood the hydraulic pressure. The superstructure had been designed to be high enough to exceed the historical floods identified by the valley’s experience as the relevant standard. Hurricane Irene’s flood at North Blenheim was higher than that standard. The water reached the bridge deck.

The debris load carried by the current struck the upstream face of the truss. The hydraulic force exerted by a flood carrying this volume at this speed against a structure presenting the fully sheathed face of a two-hundred-and-thirty-two-foot bridge across the channel is a force of a magnitude no flood the Schoharie had produced in the one hundred and fifty-six years before August 28, 2011, had ever imposed on the structure at North Blenheim. The abutments resisted that force up to the limit that Irene’s flood exceeded. The bridge lifted off its abutments on the night of August 28, 2011.

The current took it. It did not float away intact. The structure that had been a bridge for one hundred and fifty-six years became wreckage in the current that displaced it. The wreckage moved downstream and deposited as the flood receded.

When the county was able to send people to look for it, the components of the two-hundred-and-thirty-two-foot lattice truss were in the creek, on the banks, and in the fields between the creek and the valley walls, in the condition that one hundred and fifty-six years of structural service and one night of catastrophic flood loading leave a wooden structure torn from its foundations by a mountain torrent in flood. The abutments at North Blenheim were still in place when the water receded. The Schoharie Valley limestone the builders had placed in 1855 stood intact above the floodwater that no longer carried anything. The bearing surfaces on which the trusses had rested for one hundred and fifty-six years were there, while the trusses were gone.

What Irene destroyed in a single night at North Blenheim was a structure that had survived one hundred and fifty-six years of Schoharie Valley weather, including the harshest floods the valley had produced in a century of reliable measurement before 2011. It survived because Powers built it with sufficient depth in the trusses, sufficient material in the lattice, and sufficient height above the normal flood level that the ordinary Schoharie flood, the 1914 flood, and the flood of every other harsh season between 1855 and 2011 passed beneath it without reaching it. Irene was not an ordinary Schoharie flood. The rainfall totals the storm discharged over the Catskill watershed in twenty-four hours from August 27 to 28 were not totals the watershed’s historical record had produced before.

The engineering margin Powers built into the structure in 1855 was a margin calibrated to the historical record available in 1855 plus whatever additional intuitive reserve his experience told him to include. The historical record in 1855 did not include Irene. No one’s record included it. A replica of the Blenheim Covered Bridge was completed on the original abutments in 2021, built to the dimensions of the 1855 structure on the same bearing surfaces, using the same lattice design Powers specified for the two-hundred-and-thirty-two-foot span.

The replica was built on the basis of a flood analysis the original structure never had. Its deck elevation was set to exceed the level of Irene’s flood, the new design standard for the North Blenheim crossing established by the event that ended the life of the structure it replaced. You can stand on the bank of the Schoharie Creek at North Blenheim and watch the new bridge above the old abutments. The stones of the abutments are the limestone the valley’s builders placed in 1855.

The bearing surfaces that carried the 1855 trusses for one hundred and fifty-six years now carry the 2021 trusses, built to the same two-hundred-and-thirty-two-foot span, the same lattice geometry, the same truss depth Nicholas Montgomery Powers set for this crossing more than one hundred and seventy years ago. The creek runs below it in whatever condition the Catskill watershed happens to be in on the day you go to look. On an ordinary summer day, the water is clear, cold, and fast-running over the gravel and limestone of a valley that, in its parts away from the highway, is still the kind of land a carpenter of 1855 would recognize as the place where he worked. The wooden peg the carpenter drove at the intersection of two white pine planks over the Schoharie Creek in 1855 held for one hundred and fifty-six years.

The peg was in the lattice when the bridge lifted off the abutments on the night of August 28, 2011. It is now in the creek or in the valley soil downstream of North Blenheim, in whatever condition a tightly driven wooden peg is in after one hundred and fifty-six years of structural service and one night of flood. Nicholas Montgomery Powers’s name is in the National Historic Landmark documentation. His name is in county histories and bridge histories and accounts of the structure’s construction.

The carpenter’s name is in the Schoharie County accounts at the level the 1855 accounting preserved it, as part of the project’s labor cost. He drove the peg. He moved to the next position. He drove it again.

The structure he built stood for one hundred and fifty-six years. The creek took it in a single night. The abutments are still there.