The carpenter drove a wooden pin through the overlapping planks, two layers of white pine stacked one on the other, the blow of his mallet seating the pin through both boards and binding three thicknesses of wood at a point that was one of hundreds of similar points repeated across the face of the truss taking shape above the temporary staging over Schoharie Creek. It was one of thousands of pins he had driven that week. It would be one of tens of thousands before the bridge at North Blenheim was finished. He drove it with a wooden mallet, moved to the next position in the timber grid, and drove another.
The motion was not complicated. Pin, mallet, surface. He had been repeating it since before the sun fully cleared the valley walls to the east, and he would keep at it until the light failed or the foreman ordered the crew off the staging for the evening. Tomorrow he would climb back up and resume where he had stopped.
The creek ran below him in its spring flow, cold and clear, carrying the last of the snowmelt off the Catskills twenty miles to the east. He could hear it through the gaps in the staging planks. The structure rising above him that spring spanned 232 feet from bearing to bearing across the open water of the stream. 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 pins into the lattice planks over a mountain creek in upstate New York in the spring of 1855 was building something that had never been built before, in the sense that he was building it to a length no predecessor had reached. He did not know this in any way that would have changed the character of his day. He knew his work well. Pin, mallet, board surface, next position.
He knew the sound of the creek below and the cold of the spring mornings in the Schoharie Valley before the sun crossed the eastern ridgeline, when the temperature at the valley floor stayed low well into mid-morning even in May. He knew the foreman, the schedule, and the wage 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 creek at North Blenheim badly enough to pay the cost of a structure this size, one must 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 to it.
Schoharie Creek runs roughly ninety miles from its headwaters in the eastern Catskills to its confluence with the Mohawk River near Fort Plain in Montgomery County. It drains a basin of about 940 square miles of Catskill foothills and valley farmland, a region that was transforming in 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. Roads running alongside 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 steep-sided basin with thin soils and volatile Catskill weather does not maintain a predictable level. Spring melt in the Catskills raised the Schoharie by feet within hours when temperatures rose quickly after a heavy-snow winter. Summer thunderstorms over the Catskill Plateau, which could drop several inches of rain in a few hours on an already saturated basin, produced sudden rises that caught people at the crossings when the water was still low and the sky overhead still showed the character of the storm rather than its aftermath.
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 serviceable depth without sweeping away a horse or a loaded wagon. A ford did not work when the creek ran above that threshold. The threshold 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 demands of the farm and left the crossing problem to be solved when the time came to reach the crossroads.
Ferries at the main crossings offered an alternative to the ford when the ford was unusable. They cost a fare, a boat, and time to complete the crossing under the control of a man whose judgment of safe crossing conditions did not always match that of the person waiting on the bank with a time-sensitive load. A 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 running in the Schoharie Valley at the levels at which the ford was most likely impassable. The ferry and the ford were not a permanent solution to the crossing problem.
They were a recurring one. 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 location in the decades before 1855. The records of those structures are fragmentary, and what they reflect is that the earlier crossings had not solved the problem to the county’s satisfaction, whether through flood damage, structural decay, inadequate span, or a combination of these factors.
The bridge Schoharie County contracted for was meant 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 about 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 timber roof and side walls that enclosed the truss, was not an aesthetic choice in the way that ornamentation on 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 timber members and through surfaces that held moisture after rain. The freeze-thaw cycle worked on the joints while sun dried surfaces and caused them to check, opening routes for moisture. The cumulative effect of northeastern weather on unprotected timber was a systematic decay that no maintenance regime could fully stop.
A wooden bridge roofed and side-sheltered from direct weather lasted 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 the truss were large beams, posts, and diagonal braces connected at joints with wooden joinery requiring skilled craftsmen to execute properly. The skill requirements of the heavy timber truss were a barrier in rural areas where skilled carpenters were scarce or expensive, and a barrier in production wherever the volume of bridge building exceeded the supply of professional joiners able to execute the connections to specification. Heavy timber also required massive materials. The principal members of an 80- or 100-foot timber truss had to be large enough in cross-section to carry bending loads, and durable timbers in the northeastern states were 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 from one and a half to two inches thick, material available at any sawmill in the northeastern states at customary prices. The planks were laid diagonally across the depth of the truss, crossing each other at roughly a 45-degree angle, with the crossing points fastened by wooden pins driven through both planks at the intersection. 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 split or cracked, or if a wooden pin loosened at one of its intersections, the load was redistributed to the neighboring planks without catastrophic consequence. The lattice design was tolerant of the variations in material and workmanship that were inevitable 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 much 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 paying in advance.
The two-dollar rate worked as a penalty and as an incentive for future compliance, and the records of Town’s inspection tours suggest the incentive worked incompletely but persistently in the northeastern bridge-building economy. 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 the mills cut into planks used by the valley’s builders. The rivers descending from the Green Mountain slopes toward Otter Creek and Lake Champlain were 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 covered wooden bridge methods that were developing across New England and New York since the early part of the century. No precise details of his apprenticeship survive in publicly available sources. What his career records show is that by his late twenties he was building covered bridges across river crossings in Vermont and northern New York on his own account.
By the time he was contracted for the Schoharie crossing in the mid-1850s, his completed work was enough for the county to trust him to build 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 recognition would have called the science of engineering. He was a builder in the practical tradition of the trade, a man who learned what a timber structure could carry and how it had to be built to carry it through experience of building timber structures and watching them perform under load and fail.
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 232-foot Schoharie crossing asked of him was an extension of that range of experience. The 232-foot clear opening 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 80 to 160 feet.
A single 232-foot opening in lattice required a load-to-span relationship that had not been tested at this scale in existing American construction. The depth of the truss, the vertical distance from the top chord to the bottom chord, had to relate to the span length to maintain sufficient rigidity under the moving load of a heavy wagon crossing the bridge. At a 232-foot span, the required truss depth reached nearly 28 to 30 feet. A truss as tall as a three-story building running the full length of the bridge.
Powers set the truss depth within that range. That 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 156 years under loads that increased substantially during 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 pier at Raleigh twenty years before, through the accumulated judgment of a builder who had watched timber and stone structures long enough to know, within a margin he had learned to trust, what was sufficient. The abutments were built first. The bearing surfaces that would receive the ends of the 232-foot trusses had to be set at the correct elevation and alignment before the temporary staging went up and before truss assembly could begin.
The abutment stone came from the limestone formations of the Schoharie Valley, Devonian carbonate rock underlying the valley floor and lower valley walls throughout the county. The limestone splits with greater predictability along its bedding planes than the Maryland Piedmont granite. It is 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 set to sufficient compressive strength to carry the loading the lattice trusses would impose on the bearing surfaces.
The abutments were the work that had to be complete before the carpenter crews could begin the temporary work over the creek. The temporary work was the falsework, the temporary 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 pins fully seated. 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 232-foot span, the falsework in the Schoharie Creek channel was a substantial temporary structure in its own right. Timber piles driven into the creek bed, capped with horizontal frames, rising to the level of the bridge’s bottom chord, spaced to provide support to the growing lattice without allowing any unsupported length between supports to exceed what the incomplete bridge could carry. Building the falsework was work that had to be done in the creek, whatever its conditions, in the season when the Schoharie’s level dropped enough to permit work in it. The falsework was also the work the Schoharie could destroy.
A rise in the creek during construction, before the bridge above was complete and the falsework removed, was a risk the construction schedule had to account for. The seasonal window for working inside the Schoharie was the period when its level dropped reliably, from late summer into fall, before the spring melt. Any construction schedule leaving falsework in the water through 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 significant stands of old-growth white pine and hemlock, first-growth trees of the Northeast that had been cut from the coastal zones and lower Hudson Valley lands during the previous century but remained standing in the Catskill highlands. The old-growth white pine of 1855 was a different material from the new-growth pine the sawmills would produce within a generation. The fibers were densely packed, the growth rings narrow, formed over centuries rather than decades. The wood was dense and resin-laden in a way younger, faster-growing material was not, and that resin content contributed to its durability under the fluctuating moisture conditions inside a covered bridge.
The sawmills supplying the bridge timber operated in the stream valleys adjoining 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 move in a day over the condition of Schoharie Valley roads in the 1850s. The construction crew Powers assembled at Blenheim was the workforce of the region’s carpenters, men from Schoharie County and its neighbors who possessed the basic carpentry skills required for lattice construction and could be hired by the day or by the job 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 the 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 employment records for the bridge construction survive in a form that identifies 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 equipment, with the equipment line covering pins, iron fittings, and wooden pegs.
The carpentry line covers the wages of the men who drove those pins. The names of those men exist in that line at the level of detail preserved by the accounting of a small rural county in 1855. The wooden pegs were the fasteners that held the lattice together. Each intersection of two layers of lattice planks required one peg, a round wooden dowel about an 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 other dense hardwoods that resisted compression and splitting better than the pine of the lattice planks. A peg that was well driven and fully seated in a tight hole created a practically rigid joint under the slight deflections the truss experienced under load. A peg that was not fully driven left a gap between it and the board surface, allowing the crossing planks to move partially against each other under the repeated loading and unloading of the truss as traffic passed. A lattice with a significant number of loose joints in this manner lost the cumulative effect that gave it its load-distributing character.
The structural decay resulting from inadequately driven pegs was not sudden. It was gradual, and it ran along the path of the weakest joints. The construction supervisor at Blenheim was the man responsible for the quality of those joints. The responsibility was not merely a technical calculation.
It was practical inspection. Was the peg seated flush with the surface? Was the expansion at the end complete? Was light showing between the peg and the bearing surface of the board?
Inspection had to be performed for every peg driven across 232 feet of a two-truss, two-faced lattice structure. The number of wooden pegs in the Blenheim bridge ran into the thousands. The number of inspection movements required to check them was on the same order. The Blenheim bridge was a double-lane structure, carrying two roadways under one roof, wide enough for two loaded wagons to pass each other inside the bridge without one waiting at the entrance for the road to clear.
This double width was unusual in covered bridge construction. Most covered bridges in New York and New England were single-lane structures carrying only one vehicle. The double width at the Blenheim bridge reflected the volume of traffic expected at this crossing. A single-lane bridge at a busy crossing during the fall harvest, when loaded grain wagons headed from both sides of the creek to the mills, caused congestion at each entrance and slowed the valley’s commercial traffic in its most time-sensitive season.
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 of the Blenheim bridge were built to carry both. The extra proportion in depth and material required by the extra dead load was built into Powers’s design. Whether he calculated it or estimated it by 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 on it for 156 years. The bridge was completed and opened to traffic in 1855. As for any formal ceremony attending its opening, none was 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 across 156 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.
The cars grew heavier over the decades, 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 in a single event, but in the slow accumulation of a century of technology placing increasing weight on a structure built for the technology of 1855. Maintenance crews in Schoharie County worked on the bridge according to cycles appropriate to a covered timber structure in a northeastern climate. The roof covering was the first line of defense and the first component needing periodic renewal.
The side boards protecting the truss interior from weather needed attention on cycles determined by exposure and the quality of the original material. The floor planks, receiving the direct load of traffic and direct contact with wheels and hooves, were the component consumed at the fastest rate and requiring the most frequent replacement. The lattice truss members behind the boards were what the cover protected, and in well-maintained covered bridges they were the least exposed to damage. In 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 Schoharie flood events 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 beyond its seasonal level, while the bridge stood above those events at the elevation Powers had chosen, above the flood lines that valley experience had identified as relevant design events, absorbing hydraulic load on the abutment faces without moving, and continuing its function as the water receded. The most prominent flood in the historical record before Hurricane Irene came in 1914, when the Schoharie rose to levels the valley had not previously recorded in the period of reliable measurement. The water reached the lower parts of structures along the banks in the North Blenheim area.
The water did not reach the bridge deck. The truss stood 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.
The 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, truss, and structural system dimensions that made the bridge what it was. The carpenters who drove the wooden pins through the lattice planks in the spring and summer of 1855 exist in the landmark documentation at the same level that Schoharie County’s 1855 accounting preserved them, as a cost of the construction project, not as individuals within it. The man who drove the pin at the start of this narrative, working the lattice over the spring creek, moving from position to position, driving it again, is present in those records as a monetary amount in a carpentry labor line. 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. It is the state of the historical record for construction workers in rural nineteenth-century America. The responsible party to the contract appears. The engineer or master 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 labor is counted. The men are counted as a cost of that labor.
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 the seasonal average.
Stream gauges were recording low water values. The Catskills to the east were covered in the usual late-summer vegetation, above 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 seaboard during August 27. The storm carried late-summer Atlantic moisture over the Catskills through the night of the 27th and the morning and afternoon of the 28th.
The rainfall totals over the Catskill basin during those twenty-four hours exceeded any values recorded in the modern measurement history of the region. The watershed was dry when the rain began. The dry soil absorbed the first raindrops. As the rain continued at rates exceeding the soil’s absorption capacity, runoff began moving off the steep Catskill slopes into the tributary streams, and from them into Schoharie Creek, and the Schoharie began to rise.
It rose through the evening of August 27, through the night, and into the morning of August 28. The stream gauge at Prattsville, upstream of North Blenheim, recorded levels exceeding any previous observation in that station’s history. The water carried debris from the upper valley, trees, timber, and structural materials from buildings the flood was destroying in the Catskill towns, along with vehicles, fuel tanks, and everything a raging flood collects as it passes through inhabited areas at the speed and volume Irene’s flood generated. The floodwater reached the North Blenheim crossing and rose to strike the abutment faces of the Blenheim bridge.
The masonry the valley’s builders had laid in 1855 held the hydraulic pressure. The truss above had been designed for an elevation exceeding the historic floods that valley experience had identified as the relevant standard. The Hurricane Irene flood at North Blenheim was higher than that standard. The water reached the bridge deck.
The debris load the current carried 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 covered face of a 232-foot bridge to the channel is a force of a magnitude no flood produced by the Schoharie in the 156 years before August 28, 2011, had ever imposed on the structure at North Blenheim. The abutments resisted that force up to the limit that the Irene 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 156 years became wreckage in the current that displaced it. The debris moved downstream and settled as the flood receded.
When the county was able to send people to look for it, the components of the 232-foot lattice truss lay in the creek, on the banks, and in the fields between the creek and the valley walls in the condition in which 156 years of structural service and one night of catastrophic flood loading leave a timber structure torn from its foundations by a mountain stream in flood. The abutments at North Blenheim were still in place when the water receded. The Schoharie Valley limestone the masons had laid in 1855 stood intact above the floodwater that no longer carried anything. The bearing surfaces on which the trusses had rested for 156 years were present, while the trusses were gone.
What Irene destroyed in one night at North Blenheim was a structure that had survived 156 years of Schoharie Valley weather, including the most severe 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 elevation above the normal flood level, so that the ordinary Schoharie flood, the flood of 1914, 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 the twenty-four hours from August 27 to 28 were not totals the watershed’s historical record had produced before.
The margin of engineering Powers built into the structure in 1855 was a margin calibrated to the historical record available in 1855 plus whatever 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 1855 structure’s dimensions, on the same bearing surfaces, using the same lattice design Powers had specified for the 232-foot span.
The replica was built on the basis of flood analysis the original structure never had. Its deck elevation was set to exceed the Irene flood level, 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 Schoharie Creek at North Blenheim and watch the new bridge above the old abutments. The abutment stones are the limestone the valley’s builders laid in 1855.
The bearing surfaces that carried the 1855 trusses for 156 years now carry the 2021 trusses, built to the same 232-foot span, the same lattice geometry, the same truss depth that Nicholas Montgomery Powers set for this crossing more than 170 years ago. The creek runs below in whatever condition the Catskill watershed is in on the day you go to look. On an ordinary summer day, the water is clear, cold, and fast over the gravel and limestone of a valley that remains, in its parts distant from the highway, the kind of land a carpenter of 1855 would recognize as the place where he worked. The wooden pin the carpenter drove at the intersection of two white pine planks over Schoharie Creek in 1855 held for 156 years.
It was in the lattice when the bridge lifted off its 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 156 years of structural service and one night of flood. Nicholas Montgomery Powers’s name is in the National Historic Landmark documentation. It is in the county histories and the bridge histories and the accounts of the structure’s construction.
The carpenter’s name is in the Schoharie County accounts at the level that 1855 accounting preserved it, as part of the project’s labor cost. He drove the pin. He moved to the next position. He drove it again.
The structure he built stood for 156 years. The creek took it in one night. The abutments remain in place.
