In recent years it has been my practice to reserve the third weekend in September for a visit to the Washington-Greene County Covered Bridge Festival. There are thirty surviving covered bridges in the two counties; each year local residents organize a variety of different activities at ten of the them. When I looked over this year’s schedule I realized that I have visited the eight bridges in Washington County in the past few years, and that it was time for me to include Greene County on my itinerary.
Fortunately my daughter Elizabeth was free that Sunday and interested in an adventure. I decided we should visit the Carmichaels Bridge first, then go on the White Bridge. We drove down I-79 to the Waynesburg exit, then headed east on Route 21, eventually finding ourselves in the middle of the town square in the village of Carmichaels, with no evidence anywhere of the covered bridge festival.
“Let’s head for that tree line; there has to be a creek there”. And sure enough, we quickly found Muddy Creek, the bridge, and a very respectable festival nearby. The centerpiece of the festival was a well maintained old building, half stone and half brick. We soon learned the stone portion was built in 1790 as an Episcopal church. The brick section was added in 1810 and the building converted to a school. Currently it serves as the home for the Greene Academy of Art and the Carmichaels Historical Society. For the festival it was filled with a combination of historic exhibits and crafts tables.
The lawn adjacent to the building had another dozen vendor booths plus a stage with a quintet of chronologically challenged male musicians simulating folk rock groups from the 1970s. I successfully identified one of their efforts as being a Beach Boys classic. We took advantage of the opportunity to enjoy a “festival sausage special” sandwich while enjoying their music.
We then walked over to the bridge, just in time to see a horse drawn wagon pass through. I pointed out to Beth that, although all the Washington County spans were painted red, this one was white. I knew that the other bridge we planned to visit was also white. It turns out that four of the seven surviving covered bridges in Greene County are painted white; the other three are unpainted. There actually was a red bridge over Ten-Mile Creek (one end in Washington County, the other in Greene County). It collapsed in 1994 and was not replaced.
The Festival website describes the Carmichaels Bridge as being a queen-post truss. As a retired Statics professor and purist, I question that classification. The function of a truss is to accept concentrated vertical loads from the bridge deck at its panel points. By definition, a queen post truss has rugged timber posts at third points of the span, a compression strut connecting them at the top, and diagonal compression braces transferring the load to the supports, leaving an unbraced bay in the middle span.
This design works well for short (forty feet?) spans where only two panel points are required. The Carmichaels Bridge spans about sixty-four feet, with five transverse deck girders hanging from the truss panel points. Its requirement for three additional panel points is cleverly met by adding a tension rod at mid-span with compression diagonals from its top to the bottom of the adjacent posts; plus a similar rod attached to the mid-point of the compression braces, braced by an additional diagonal leading to the base of the posts.
From Carmichaels we relied on our GPS system to find the White Bridge, which was about eight miles to the southeast, on Whitely Creek near the hamlet of Garard’s Fort. Once we found the site, we were directed to a large parking area serviced by golf cart shuttles. Our shuttle ride took us to the edge of the main complex, which must have included one hundred different booths, each of which we visited. This involved a wide variety – food, organizations, churches, and the typical collection of arts and crafts (jewelry, needlework, ceramics, woodworking, etc.). My favorite was a historical exhibit sponsored by “the second oldest Baptist congregation in the United States”, the Reverend John Corbly Memorial Baptist Church.
Being Sunday and being in Greene County, the entertainment was gospel music. We sat near the stage and listened to a gentleman and two ladies sing a series of pleasant gospel hymns while waiting for the “Battle for the Bridge”, a Civil War Re-enactment scheduled for 3:00 pm. Prior to the battle we inspected the proposed battlefield as well as the opposing teams in their respective encampments. They turned out to be members of Knap’s Battery, a re-enactment group based in Greensburg.
Right on schedule, a dozen Rebel soldiers came across the bridge, spotted a Union force in a nearby field, and immediately attacked. The boys in blue responded and a pitched battle began. The first casualty was the Union flag-bearer; another soldier immediately picked up the banner. After several Confederate infantrymen fell, one of their compatriots decided he had had enough and hightailed it back toward the bridge. He was rewarded by being shot in the back by his lieutenant! To paraphrase General Sherman, “War ain’t Heaven”. When the Federal drummer went down, the enraged Union soldiers surged forward, driving the Confederates back across the bridge. The crowd cheered, and we hitched a shuttle ride back to the parking lot.
The White Bridge is two feet longer than Carmichaels; its truss is similar except for the tension member at mid-span being a timber rather than an iron rod. Certainly not a queen post truss!
The fine weather helped make this a very enjoyable day. We are grateful the Covid crisis has reduced sufficiently to permit such events to occur and especially that so many Greene County folks worked together to make them successful.