When Sarah Palin booked a flight to Europe, the French immediately surrendered.
Wednesday - July 11, 2012
A Target Rich Environment
3 Phoenix, 10 Tiny Ponies, 2 “Horses”, 3 Deer, And The Ghost Of A Fink
No, it’s not a phone order for Barbarian Carry Out
The MIL’s health situation got too stressful for me, so I went hunting. With a camera. Bridge Hunting. Boy did I score.
I am very fortunate to live in an area positively saturated with historic bridges. They’re everywhere, but you’ll never see one if you only stick to the major roads. You have to go a few blocks back, at which point almost all of the county becomes really rural and the calendar seems to rewind about a century or so. I figured out why these old chunks of metal have lived so long too: they are all in a pocket neighborhood, a north-south rectangle that has always had bypass routes on either side. You can get between Clinton and Interstate Route 78 (just north of this map) and Flemington and Route 202/206 by taking the back when down the west side of this zone on county roads and, or you can make the trip using local highway Route 31 to the east. So there is no real reason to go into that neighborhood unless you live there. And if you do live there, heavy trucks can get in and out using both those paths; they never have to pass over any of these antique ironworks.
I’ve written about a few of the bridges around here before, and with the “House” bridge post the other day you were reminded that it’s one of my interests. Well, the weather has been bearable the past two days, and I really, really needed to get away for a bit. So I did. And I really enjoyed the fresh air and the absolute silence you get in the country. I stood in the middle of the road on nearly a dozen bridges, taking loads of pictures, and only twice had to step aside to let any kind of vehicle come past. For a suburbanite, that’s some kind of ideal. Only thing better would be being 16 and spending the day lazily tubing down the river with friends, like I saw a few kids doing. What an excellent way to spend a day in July.
I like old truss bridges because they are science and architecture that I can understand. You can see how they work just by looking at them, and most of them are so light and minimalist that you can actually watch them working when a car drives by. Put a load here and this piece gets stretched, and that piece over there gets compressed. Which means that the load had to have been carried to it by that one over there. Just try doing that with a modern circuit board. I understand nuts and bolts the size of my hands, and rivets big enough to use as hammer heads. But when bridges get too big and too strong, then you can’t see them working, and that’s a shame. Today’s modern spans are so strong, so tight, and so generic that their magic is hidden. And I think that’s a shame. Granted, put me in a big heavy truck, or out in a hurricane on a bridge, and I’ll choose a modern over-built job any day of the week and be thankful. But I just don’t see the grace in them, which is why I appreciate all the flyweight “fairy bridges” we have on the back roads here in Hunterdon County. Art you can drive on, physics you can see working. All is right with the world.
I took a ton of photos. Maybe I’ll make a bridges section in the Gallery and upload them. But every last one is already online, usually with better photographs than I could take. But I’ll share some anyway.
The entire northern half of New Jersey, except for the western escarpment just a few miles wide along the Delaware River border with Pennsylvania, drains into the Atlantic Ocean at Raritan Bay, just south of Staten Island. Geologists call the land the Newark Basin. And every little stream flows there eventually, joining up with other streams along the way, forming rivers of decent size. One of our rivers is the South Branch of the Raritan River, usually locally just called the South Branch. It’s everywhere it seems. Hunterdon has been populated since the Dutch held New Amsterdam, and most of the roads were laid down long before the revolution. So we had hundreds of little wooden bridges once upon a time, and as they wore out they got replaced with something made from iron or steel. But the population was stable for ages, so the bridges never really got worn out. So they’re still standing. And they get maintained; the county long ago figured out that these old iron works add to the local charm, and help bring in the tourist dollars. Yummy delicious tourist dollars. So very few have been left to rot or replaced with modern ones unless the old ones got destroyed.
Lower Landsdowne Road, iron Pratt truss, 1885
My 2nd most favorite fairy bridge. It’s made from cast and wrought iron, not steel. Pinned sections of course. It uses cast quarter round sections riveted together into tubes for the uprights and top chords, called Phoenix columns. This single lane bridge is only about 3 car lengths long, and it’s so lightly built that you can hardly even see it from the wrong angle. And it’s been in constant use since 1885. Like the Main Street bridge in downtown Clinton, the other Phoenix column bridges here, and a couple other ones, the metal came from the Cowin iron works in Lambertville NJ, just a couple towns to the south. It’s 4 section Phoenix columns are REALLY small. The modern barrier protects the bridge as much as it protects the drivers, but it kind of hurts the aesthetics. And no, that’s not the hand of God. That’s the hand of Drew. This bridge is skewed, which means that one end is longer than the other. All bridges are built on the cheap and they always have been. A skewed bridge shows that, because nobody was willing to spend the extra money on an unnecessary extra end post. They don’t add much strength, so they often get cut from the budget.
Lots more on the overleaf, if you aren’t already yawning. All of these pictures are now linked, so click on any of them to see them in their original 4000x3000 12MP format.
The Lower Landsdowne bridge is off on a side creek in a boggy area, about a half mile from the South Branch proper. If you wanted to go on an unhurried bridge spotting odyssey, you couldn’t go wrong by starting out with the Main Street bridge in Clinton (not covered in this post) and putting your canoes, kayaks, or inner tubes in the river just below the dam by our famous Red Mill. Then you can just float along, and see all these bridges plus at least half a dozen semi-interesting railroad bridges, in the space of a few hours. I don’t know how fast the river flows, not too fast, but all of these bridges are within a 3 mile water journey, start to finish. Have somebody pick you up at Stanton Station Road, or opt to laze your afternoon away some more and go another couple of miles downstream to see the Rockafellows Mill bridge and then the double bridges at Higginsville Road (also not covered in this post). Visit the Landsowne and Payne Road bridges on your drive back up to Clinton. If you do that, you are sure to have your bridge spotting desires satiated by nearly two dozen old bridges in a day. And you’ll hardly even have to paddle. Then have a great meal in one of our top rated local restaurants, while you recount your adventure with your friends. The Duck Chu Chee at Pru Thai is awesome, and just a block from the river.
Upper Hamden Road modern steel half-subdivided Warren two span pony truss, 1995
Go down Landsdown and turn left on Hamden. A quarter mile up the road is this modern monster. There had been a great little old fairy bridge there until 1995, but it got washed away in a storm. So some engineer - who thinks like me I gather - came in and put in a bridge that ain’t never EVER going to wash out, break down, or be over burdened. You could run tanks across this thing. Holy cow. It’s a double Warren Truss [ my error: this is NOT a double Warren, it is a half reinforced (subdivided) Warren Truss (notice that a vertical bisects only every other “V” and “/\”,)], and because the sections aren’t connected across the top it’s called a pony. But these things are too big to be ponies, so I’m calling them horses just for fun.
Lower Hamden Road’s ghost: the Fink truss that once was. 1858 iron through truss
Turn around and go back down Hamden, and the road suddenly has a barrier across it. Dead end. It used to go through. It used to go over the Fink. But no more. The Fink is dead. Gone. A ghost. Somebody killed him with a Chevy, in 1978.
This nice little Pratt truss foot bridge crosses the South Branch where the Fink once stood, and now cars have to take the long way around. The neighbors like it like that. No through traffic at all. Not that Hamden Road is that busy a street.
The Fink that was. This was the oldest metal bridge in the USA, being built just 4 years after Herr Fink came up with the design and patented it. It was in continuous service from 1858 - 1978. There is only one other Fink Truss left in the country, perhaps in the world. And while that one, the Zoarville bridge is prettier, and once was much bigger, ours was 10 years older and in actual use for much longer. Looks a lot like a Bollman truss, doesn’t it? Um, a what???
Fink vs. Bollman. Similar very early truss designs, though the Fink uses less metal - and cheaper always wins in bridge designs of equal ability. The problem with both bridges is that the end posts carry the entire load of the bridge. And neither designer had a full size 70s Chevy in mind when they came up with these cast iron designs before the Civil War even began.
Chevy vs. Cast Iron Kingpost: both lose. The death of the Hamden Road Fink Truss, 1978
But Hunterdon can still claim the title of “oldest metal bridge in America”, because after the accident they gathered up the pieces and put them in a warehouse. For someday, when they could find someone to recast the kingpost. And afford it. Fink bridges were a kind of Phoenix column bridge too, but it’s hard to hunt what isn’t there. So call the score so far 1 Phoenix, 2 horses, and 1 ghost. If you follow the above links to the Zoarville bridge, notice how much heavier Fink made his kingposts on that one, after only 10 years of practice. You live, you learn. Understanding old truss bridges is a kind of evolution in iron and steel. It took about 70 years for the truss to fully evolve. The very early ones seemed to be iron versions of “jungle” wooden plank bridges suspended by ropes. The later ones were marvels of strength and simplicity. Then pre-stressed concrete came along, and that was pretty much the end of the truss bridge era.
Footprints of greatness, and the only remaining piece of the original. I think I should rename this the “Ozymandius Bridge”.
Moving right along; a collection of miniature ponies. Bridge history sites exclaim in wonder about Hunterdon County’s use of double and triple pony trusses where other towns would simply build a larger single section bridge. But those were newer pony bridges, the pieces brought in by truck. Ours came in by horse drawn wagon. And around tight corners, and up and down steep little forested hills. I think that explains why we have so many itty bitty old pony bridges here. Plenty of open space in Oklahoma. Nice and flat in most parts of Kansas.
Payne Road Bridge, steel Pratt pony truss, 1900
The Payne Road bridge. It’s as small as it gets: two ends and a middle section. 45 feet? Thereabouts. A bit longer than two pickup trucks, but it seems shorter. This 1899ish bridge (the abutment is marked 05-30-03) started out as a pinned section mini-truss. Later on strengthening bits were bolted on, and later on after that more strengthening bits were welded on. Outriggers got added at some point ... but underneath all the additions is still a wood floored pinned Warren truss of the most flyweight design. Payne Road is mostly farm, and has been since forever. The bridge was built to carry a single haywain from the fields to the main road, or maybe to drive a few cows across.
It wasn’t made of I beams or angle iron sections. This one was put together out of straps. Outside of a Tinker Toy set, this is the most lightly built metal bridge I’ve ever seen ... which is why it needed so much strengthening over the years.
We interrupt this post for a word about deer. Take some, they’re free. Please. As many as you want. PLEASE. We try to hunt them but it just doesn’t make a difference. We’re infested. Two deer free with every purchase over $10. This coupon may be doubled; you can take four if you want to, or even six if you ask nicely.
And now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.
Pine Hill Road / Camp Buck Road, pinned double Pratt pony truss, 1900
Coming back to the river from our little excursion down Payne Road, the next bridge we come to is the first of our old multi-ponies. It’s one of those “you can’t get there from here” kind of places, down the hill, through the forest, around the sharp corners on a semi-paved road, and up to a dead end. The road ends at what once was the Boy Scout’s Camp Buck, but is now park of the county park system and is a YMCA day camp called Camp Carr. This bridge is about twice the size of the Payne Road bridge - duh, it’s a DOUBLE pony - and is just as lightly made. Lucky for bridge spotters that this one hasn’t received so much reinforcing over the years. You can still see how it was made from thin flat stock - sheet metal nearly - bolted together. The angle sections are built up from flat bits riveted together, and then the whole affair was pinned and bolted in place. A few triangular outriggers got welded on at some later date, and the original wooden decking was replaced with corrugated steel plate, but otherwise this one is all original. Most of the kids get picked up from the other end of the camp, so the only traffic this bridge sees is a few moms in minivans during the summer. We’re about 1000 yards downstream of the Hamden Road footbridge and the flood control pond that’s next to it, so the South Branch is very shallow and placid here. If it weren’t for all the noisy kids having fun, it would be a great place to park the canoes or the inner tubes and have lunch.
Lower Hamdon Road, pinned iron Phoenix column Pratt truss double pony, 1885
My absolute favorite bridge anywhere. This beautiful old iron angel sits just downstream and around the bend from the Camp Buck bridge but it’s from a whole ‘nother world. You’ll immediately notice that one half of the bridge is level and the other half goes up hill. You’ll spot the Phoenix columns, since nothing else in the world looks like them, and you’ll wonder why this isn’t a through truss, since each of the two spans is just as long as the Landsdowne bridge. I have no idea, but I do know that this is the only Phoenix double pony in the state, and if there are 3 others like it in the whole country I’d be shocked.
The tail end of Hamdon Road closely follows the river and is heavily wooded. Visiting by car, looking out through the trees you can’t see the bridge at all until you’re very close to it. Then you get a couple of little tease views, you come right up to the last bend in the road and there it is. In your face, in all it’s fairy beauty. From the river you can see it from a quarter mile upstream, so you lose this sweet surprise. This bridge is no toy even if it looks like it was made from Tinker Toys. It only has a 4 ton weight limit, so a knowledgeable observer can watch the bridge flex and stiffen in all the right places when an SUV drives over. That’s really neat. Physics at work. You can’t feel the bridge moving if you drive over it, but the pieces do move ever so slightly.
Each pony is about 75-80 feet long, so the whole bridge is around 160 feet. Both abutments are on street corners, so the bridge is quite abrupt. No lead in. Road, bridge, and away we go. The uphill section goes up about a foot and a half. This has to be one of the three crown jewel bridges in the county and it’s in magnificent condition. Notice that this one was built with “regular” laced verticals in the middle, but with Phoenix columns on the end and across the top. Did the builder run out? Was this a transitional thing, or just another way to save a buck? We’ll never know, but that mix makes this bridge unique in all the world.
Like all the Phoenix column bridges in the area, this one has been strengthened with some triangular outriders and protected with some ugly modern crash barrier. I’m sure it was originally built with the flat lattice railings seen on the Camp Buck and Payne Road bridges, and on the “House” bridge I posted on the other day. And now you can see why I figured that the “House” bridge was around here somewhere; it just fits in. Right color, right age, right landscape, right railings, right pins, right size. But it’s not. It’s probably in California. Somewhere. My hunt continues.
******
I have another 4 bridges to post on, but all this uploading, creating thumbnails, making links, cross referencing, and figuring out what to write is taking forever. Come on down for a visit because it only gets better. I can even show you an 1880 through truss that was built with secret trusses on the underside. But you’ll need to bring your inner tube to see that.
I’ve been thinking about the Fink bridge and what happened to it. I’ve concluded that all of these old river princesses really ought to be in museums. (there really are bridge museums!) They survive here in Hunterdon County only because they are unknown, off the beaten track and thus only driven on by 100 local cars or so a day, and exceptionally well maintained. But even with all their reinforcements and crash barriers, it’s really only a matter of time until somebody smashes into them with a vehicle. And then these bridges will die. Very sad. But perhaps that’s as it should be, and when they go they’ll be gone. It really isn’t safe letting the public use them. We live in an idiot-proofed world, but the world keeps breeding better idiots. And the odds are that someday one of them will be driving along, sun glare or icy road conditions, talking on the cell phone, watching an in-car DVD, and having a snack all at once ...
GET ME OUT OF HERE ...
Posted by
Drew458
on 07/11/2012 at 03:28 PM
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