Folks in Ashtabula County in Ohio are proud of their covered bridges. While many vintage covered bridges around the country disappeared, this county in northeastern Ohio continues to cherish vintage covered bridges and construct ones.
Ohio once had as many as 4,000 covered bridges. Today there are about 140 covered bridges in Ohio, with 17 of those in Ashtabula County.
The county had a dozen historic covered bridges in the early 1980s, when then-Ashtabula County Engineer John Smolen began advocating covered bridges as safer, more durable, and ultimately more economical alternatives to many metal and concrete bridges.
Road salt is one of the biggest causes of deterioration in metal and concrete bridges, while salt acts to preserve wood according to Smolen. The roofs of traditional covered bridge construction further protect the roadway from weather. Concrete or metal bridges often need replacing after 50 to 75 years. Smolen felt properly maintained wooden bridges could last hundreds of years, and their increased durability meant big savings on maintenance or replacement costs.
The county constructed a handful of new covered bridges in recent decades.
Ashtabula County's covered bridges are a big tourist draw, and the county hosts annual covered bridge during the second full weekend of October.
The Covered Bridge Festival takes place at the Ashtabula County Fairgrounds. The festival schedule includes features like music, vintage vehicle shows, craft displays, kid's activities, food, a parade, contests, a Farmers Market, and a Civil War encampment.
We recently took a self-guided tour of the bridges, and the weeks preceding the Festival seem like the perfect time to share our photos and experiences.
We visited the Ashtabula's covered bridge festival and county CVB sites to order bridge tour maps and other information about the area. I received the information from both sites extremely quickly and planned our trip.
The tour map I got divides the route into two parts. Tour A has 11 bridges and covers 69 miles, while Tour B has five bridges and covers 66 miles.
You can probably finish both routes in less than a day if you drive straight through them, but why rush? We took the better part of one day to do all of Tour A and part of Tour B, visiting the final few bridges the next morning.
I'll start here with the largest covered bridge in the United States, and share my photos and information about the rest of the county's covered bridges in coming weeks.
Smolen-Gulf Bridge
Former Ashtabula County Engineer John Smolen, and current County Engineer Timothy Martin, engineered and planned for this impressive 613-foot-long span 93 feet above the Ashtabula River along County Road 25.
The Smolen-Gulf Bridge is a modified Pratt truss bridge with vertical and diagonal members sloping toward the center, a system capable of handling heavier loads. The span meets modern bridge specs and can support heavy traffic like 80,000-pound tractor-trailer rigs.
Workers used 7,000,000 pounds of concrete for supporting piers and abutments, nearly one-half million pounds of steel for reinforcement, and 613,000 board feet of lumber (enough to cover full-sized football field at a 13-inch thickness) for the project.
Check out video or photos taken throughout the construction process online.
So, how do you follow working on the nation's largest covered bridge?
Smolen established an engineering firm after retiring from the county, and he still works to add to the county's increasing number of covered bridges. A current project involves working with the city of Geneva, Ohio, to replace a deteriorating iron bridge with an 18-foot-long covered bridge. This span, currently under construction, will be Ashtabula County's eighteenth covered bridge and the shortest covered bridge in the nation.
Want to learn more about the history of covered bridges in Ohio?
Ohio's Covered Bridges (Postcard History) by Elma Lee Moore contains postcard images of more than 200 historic bridges in the state, including many that no longer exist.
Covered Bridges of Ohio: An Atlas and History by Miriam Wood is an older book, but several places I consulted cite this book written by a charter member of the Ohio Historic Bridge Association as an authoritative source on Ohio covered bridge history.
Plan your road trip with the help of the Ohio Atlas & Gazetteer. I love these Delorme Gazetteers that cover each individual state and include listings of features like parks, historic sites, museums, campgrounds, and other useful road trip info.
© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved
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