Qualla: Locust Creek Covered Bridge

Locust Creek Covered Bridge: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1870, a carpenter named R. N. Bruce signed a contract with Pocahontas County to build a covered bridge across Locust Creek. The contract was for $1,250 - in modern terms, somewhere between an honest week's wages and a new sedan. For that sum, Bruce produced 114 feet of timber bridge, 13.5 feet wide, framed with a Warren Double Intersection truss and roofed with hand-cut shingles. A century and a half later, his bridge still stands - rebuilt twice, retired from vehicle traffic, but unmistakably the same span, in the same spot, doing roughly the same job.

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Locust Creek Covered Bridge: Why Covered

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. Covered bridges look quaint now, but the roof was practical engineering. Wooden trusses last decades when kept dry and rot in years when exposed to weather. The covering doubled or tripled the working life of the bridge - which was the difference, in rural West Virginia in 1870, ...

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Locust Creek Covered Bridge: Twice Reborn

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. Bruce's 1870 bridge did not survive long. In 1888, it burned - whether by accident, arson, or lightning is no longer clear. Pocahontas County replaced it. In 1904 the replacement was itself heavily reconstructed by W. M. Irvine, who replaced the interior supports, trusses, side p...

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Locust Creek Covered Bridge: Retirement

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. By the 1980s, the bridge was working past its design life. Trucks and tractors had grown heavier than the 1870 carpenter ever imagined. In 1970, the structure was added to the National Register of Historic Places, which protected it from demolition but did not solve the engineeri...

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Locust Creek Covered Bridge: The Warren Double Intersection

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. The truss design Bruce used is a Warren Double Intersection - a variant of the Warren truss that the British engineer James Warren had patented in 1848. The Warren is a triangulated framework where diagonal members alternate in direction; the double-intersection version overlaps ...

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Locust Creek Covered Bridge: The Last One

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. Pocahontas County once had several covered bridges. Locust Creek is the only one left. The others are gone - burned, washed out in floods, replaced by steel, removed for being unsafe. The same story has played out across the United States: in 1900, there were probably 14,000 cove...

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0