In early spring of 1855, a carpenter in the Schoharie Valley of upstate New York drove a wooden pin through two overlapping planks of white pine, piercing the board beneath them and binding three layers of timber at an intersection that was one of hundreds of similar crossings repeating across the surface of the truss taking shape on temporary scaffolds above Schoharie Creek. The pin was one of thousands he had driven that week, and 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 cleared the valley walls 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 return and take up where he left off. Schoharie Creek flowed beneath him in its spring runoff, cold and clear, carrying the last of the snowmelt from 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 stretched 232 feet from face of abutment to face of abutment across the open water of Schoharie Creek. 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 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 did not know this in any way that would change the nature of his day. He knew his work. The pin, the mallet, the surface of the plank, the 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 ridge line, when temperatures at the valley floor 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 broader 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 Schoharie Creek at North Blenheim badly enough to bear the cost of a structure 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 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.
The creek drains a basin of about 940 square miles of Catskill foothills and valley farmland, a region that was transitioning in the first half of the nineteenth century from old-growth forest to 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 alongside it connected farms to mills, market centers, and each other through a series of crossings that worked when the creek cooperated and did not when it did not. The creek did not always cooperate.
A mountain stream draining a steep, thin-soiled basin under Catskill weather does not hold a predictable level. Spring thaw in the Catskills could raise Schoharie Creek by feet within hours when temperatures climbed quickly enough after a heavy-snow winter. Summer thunderstorms over the Catskill plateau, which could drop several inches of rain in a few hours on a basin already saturated by earlier weather, produced surges that caught people at the creek crossings when the water was still low and the sky above still showed the character of a storm rather than its aftermath. The shallow fords at the main crossings were the first answer to the problem of crossing, and they were an answer tied to a set of permanent conditions.
The ford worked when the creek was low enough to cross at a safe depth without sweeping away a horse or a loaded wagon. The ford did not work when the creek ran above that level. That 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 unusable from ice-out until 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 crossroads. Ferries at the major crossings offered an alternative to the ford when the ford was impassable, at the cost of a toll, a boat, and the time required to make the crossing under the control of a man whose judgment of safe crossing conditions did not always match the judgment of the party waiting on the bank with a time-sensitive load.
A ferry capable of carrying a wagon and its team required a sturdy flat-bottomed vessel and a crew able to work it against the current that ran in the Schoharie Valley at the levels at which a ford was most likely to be 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 partial, and what those records reflect is that the earlier crossings had not solved the problem to the county’s satisfaction, whether from flood damage, structural decay, insufficient span, or a combination of these. The bridge contracted by Schoharie County 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 covering over a bridge structure, the timber 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 timber truss exposed to direct weather in the northeastern states deteriorated at a rate that made a twenty-year service life an optimistic prediction and a fifteen-year service life a reasonable one. Rot worked its way 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 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 decay that no maintenance regimen could fully stop. A timber bridge roofed and side-protected from direct weather lasted three to five times longer than an unprotected structure of equivalent materials, according to the experience of a bridge-building economy that had been making that comparison since the 1820s. The covering added material cost and labor cost to construction, but it converted a structure requiring rebuilding every two decades into one that could serve its crossing for sixty to eighty years with ordinary maintenance at a total cost over that period that township accountants could calculate against the alternative of building the same bridge three times.
The structural system inside the covering 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 rested on heavy timber framing traditions, in which the structural members of a truss were large beams, 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 a barrier in rural areas where skilled carpenters were scarce or expensive, and a barrier in production wherever the volume of bridge construction exceeded the supply of professional carpenters able to execute joinery to specification.
Heavy timber also demanded massive materials. The principal members of a timber truss spanning eighty or a hundred feet had to be large enough in cross-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, stock available at any sawmill in the northeastern states at ordinary 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 point of 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 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 pin loosened at one of its intersections, the load was redistributed to neighboring planks without catastrophic consequence. The lattice design tolerated variations in materials and workmanship that were unavoidable when building with local lumber 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 whom 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 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 timber that mills cut into planks used by the valley’s builders, and the rivers descending from 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 covered timber bridge methods 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, and 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 field that the mid-nineteenth century would recognize as 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 must be built to carry it through experience building timber structures and observing their performance under load and their modes of failure. He knew the Town lattice system as one knows a system one has used repeatedly to achieve predictable results within a range of experience.
What the 232-foot Schoharie crossing demanded of him was an extension of that range. The clear span of 232 feet in a Town lattice truss was not a simple extension of the typical lattice spans of the 1850s. The most common covered bridge spans in New York and New England at that time ran from 80 to 160 feet. A single span of 232 feet required the lattice to carry a relationship between load and span that had not been tested at this magnitude 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 adequate stiffness 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 entire length of the bridge. Powers set a truss depth within this range.
The ratio 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 over that period, is that the ratio 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 substructure at Relay twenty years earlier, through the accumulated judgment of a builder who had watched timber and stone structures long enough to know, within a margin a builder could 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 to 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 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 a workable stone for rural masonry, quarried by men who understood its nature and dressed by masons who had worked it in the valley for decades. The abutment masons 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 abutment work had to be complete before the carpentry crews could begin the temporary work above the creek.
The temporary work was the falsework, the temporary wooden scaffolding that would support the lattice trusses during assembly. A Town lattice truss is not a self-supporting structure until the lattice panel is fully assembled and the wooden pins are fully seated. Before that point, the lattice planks are a collection of timber arranged in a pattern that has no structural integrity without support beneath it. For a 232-foot span, the falsework in the bed of Schoharie Creek was a major temporary structure in its own right.
Timber posts driven into the creek bottom, capped with horizontal framing, rising to the level of the bridge’s bottom chord, spaced to provide support for the growing lattice without allowing any unsupported length between supports to exceed what the unfinished bridge could carry. Building the falsework was work that had to be done in the creek, in whatever condition the creek was in, in the season when the Schoharie ran low enough to permit work in it. The falsework was also the work that Schoharie Creek could destroy. A rise in the creek during the construction period, before the bridge superstructure was complete and the temporary structure removed, was a risk the construction schedule had to reckon with.
The seasonal window for working in the Schoharie was the period when it ran reliably low, from late summer into fall, before the spring thaw. Any construction schedule that left falsework in the water through flood season was 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 forest of the Northeast that had been cut from the coastal regions and lower Hudson Valley lands over the preceding century but remained standing in the interior highlands of the Catskills.
Old-growth white pine in 1855 was a material different from the second-growth pine the sawmills would produce within a generation. The fibers were tightly packed, the growth rings narrow, formed over centuries rather than decades. The wood was dense and resinous in a way younger, faster-grown 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 creek valleys adjacent to the Catskill forests, using water power from the same mountain streams that fed the Schoharie.
The timber reached the site by horse-drawn wagons 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 conditions 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 job for the duration of the construction contract. The skilled element of the crew, the men who had worked with Powers on previous bridge contracts and knew the lattice sequence and its 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 accounts from the construction period record the project’s cost as a series of separate line items: the construction contract, the timber, the carpentry, the equipment, with the equipment line item covering the pins, iron fittings, and wooden pegs. The carpentry line item covers the wages of the men who drove those pins. The names of those men exist in that line item at the level of detail preserved by a small rural county’s accounting in 1855.
The wooden pegs were the connectors that locked the lattice together. Every intersection of two layers of lattice planks required one peg, a round wooden dowel roughly an inch in diameter, long enough to pass through all the layers of lattice at that point, and wedged or swelled at each exposed end to prevent the peg from slipping. The pegs were usually cut from locust or another dense hardwood that resisted crushing and splitting better than the pine of the lattice planks themselves. A peg driven home and fully seated in a tight hole created a virtually rigid joint under the slight deflections the truss underwent in loading.
A peg not fully driven left a gap between it and the surface of the plank, allowing the crossed planks to work partially against each other under the repeated loading and unloading of the truss as traffic passed over. A lattice with a large number of joints loosened in this way lost the cumulative effect that gave it its load-distributing character. The structural degradation from insufficiently driven pegs was not sudden. It was gradual, and it moved along the path of the weakest joints.
The construction supervisor at Blenheim was the person responsible for the quality of those joints. That responsibility was not merely a matter of technical calculation. It was a hands-on inspection. Did the peg seat flush with the surface?
Was the wedging at the end complete? Did light show 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 232-foot length of a lattice structure with two trusses and two faces. The number of wooden pegs in the Blenheim bridge ran into the thousands.
The number of inspection movements required to check them was in the same range. The Blenheim bridge was a double-barreled 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 accommodating 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 season, when loaded grain wagons headed from both sides of the creek to the mills, caused congestion at every entrance and slowed the valley’s commercial traffic during its most time-sensitive period. The double width required a wider roof structure, wider sides, and a heavier floor, and all that additional material was dead load the abutments carried in addition to the live load of traffic. The abutments at the Blenheim bridge were built to carry both.
The additional proportion in depth and material that the extra dead load required 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 enough, the result was the same. The structure he built carried what was placed upon it for 156 years. The bridge was completed and opened to traffic in 1855.
No formal ceremony accompanying its opening was recorded 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 originally designed for horse-drawn loads. Automobiles grew heavier over the decades, and the farm trucks that replaced 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 century of technology placing increasing weight on a structure built for the technology of 1855.
Schoharie County maintenance crews worked on the bridge according to cycles appropriate for a covered timber structure in a northeastern climate. The roof covering was the first line of defense and the first component requiring periodic renewal. The side planking protecting the truss interior from weather needed attention on cycles determined by exposure and the quality of the original material. The floor planks, receiving direct traffic load 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 planking were what the covering protected, and in well-maintained covered bridges they were the least deteriorated component. At the Blenheim bridge, those members were old-growth Catskill pine that the carpenter had pinned together over the temporary scaffolding in the spring of 1855. The bridge survived the floods of Schoharie Creek that tested it over those years. The creek flooded on its mountain schedule, in hard 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 had chosen, above the flood lines that valley experience had defined as relevant design events, absorbing hydraulic load on the abutment faces without moving, and resuming its function when the water receded.
The most prominent flood in the historical record before Hurricane Irene came in 1914, when Schoharie Creek rose to levels the valley had not recorded before in the period of reliable measurement. Water reached the lower portions of structures on the riverbanks in the North Blenheim area. It did not reach the bridge deck. The truss was above the reach of the floodwater.
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 highway crews cleared debris from the approaches and service resumed. The creek returned to its normal level.
The lattice trusses kept carrying whatever Schoharie County sent 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 builder. It recorded 1855 as the year of construction. It recorded the dimensions of the span, the truss, and the structural system 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 only at the level that Schoharie County’s 1855 accounting preserved them, as a cost of the construction project rather than as individuals within it.
The man who drove the pin at the start of this account, working the lattice above the spring creek, moving from position to position and driving it again, is present in those documents as an amount of money in the carpentry labor line item. His name is not in the landmark designation in any form that has been 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 contracting party 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. But 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 up the Atlantic coast during August 27. The storm carried late-summer Atlantic moisture over the Catskills during the night of the twenty-seventh and the morning and afternoon of the twenty-eighth. The rainfall totals over the Catskill basin in those twenty-four hours exceeded any values ever recorded in the region’s history of modern measurement. 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 capacity to absorb it, 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 flow 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 building materials from structures 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 flooding generated. The floodwater reached the North Blenheim crossing and rose to strike the abutment faces of the Blenheim bridge. The masonry the valley masons had laid in 1855 held the hydraulic pressure. The superstructure had been designed to a height above historic floods defined by valley experience 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 full covered face of a 232-foot bridge across the channel is a force of a magnitude no flood Schoharie Creek had produced 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 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 156 years became debris in the current that displaced it. The debris moved downstream and settled when 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 that 156 years of structural service and one night of catastrophic flood loading left a timber structure swept off its foundations by mountain water in flood. The abutments at North Blenheim were still in place when the water receded.
The Schoharie Valley limestone the masons 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 there, while the trusses were gone. What Irene destroyed in a single night at North Blenheim was a structure that had survived 156 years of Schoharie Valley weather, including the worst floods the valley had produced in a century of reliable measurement before 2011. It had survived because Powers built it with sufficient truss depth, sufficient lattice material, and sufficient height above the normal flood level that the ordinary Schoharie flood, the 1914 flood, and every other hard season between 1855 and 2011 passed beneath it without reaching it.
Irene was not an ordinary Schoharie flood. The rainfall totals the storm emptied over the Catskill watershed in the twenty-four hours from August 27 to 28 were not totals the watershed’s historical record had ever 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 had specified for the 232-foot span. The replica was built to a flood analysis the original structure never had. Its deck elevation was set to clear 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 stone is the limestone the valley masons 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 Nicholas Montgomery Powers specified for this crossing more than 170 years ago. The creek runs below it in whatever condition the Catskill watershed is in on the day you go to look.
On an ordinary summer day, the water is clear and cold and fast over the gravel and limestone of a valley that, in its parts away from the highway, is still the kind of country a carpenter of 1855 would recognize as the place where he worked. The wooden pin the carpenter drove through the intersection of two white pine planks above Schoharie Creek in 1855 held for 156 years. The pin 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. His name is in the county histories, the bridge histories, and the 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 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 are still there.
