A Step Back in Time

This is the first book Blaine read for science this year.

It was really neat and he ended up loving it.

It was real diary excerpts from a boy named Noah Blake,

written way back in 1805.

We read about he and his father built their house,

built a mill,

farmed,

tended animals,

and turned a simple walk-over bridge

into a covered bridge.

Lots and lots of blood, sweat and tears involved.

We are all wimps compared to people that lived back then.

Anyway, after we read all about the construction of the covered bridge,

I thought it would be neat to see if we could actually visit one.

Turns out its a little harder than you think.

While covered bridges aren't that hard to find,

old ones that haven't been rebuilt or restored are.

But while we were camping at Victoria Bryant,

we headed out on a hunt.

And we found this beauty,

all but hidden off a country road in the middle of nowhere.

Thank goodness for GPS!

It seems the Cromer family owned several mills

and built this bridge a little after 1900.

It officially stopped being used in 1943.

So it wasn't built quite as long ago as the one in the book we read,

but it had some old features still intact.

The wooden pegs attest to the age of the bridge.

We read that they used these in bridges rather than iron nails

because the iron would cause the wood to rot.

The wooden pegs would expand once in place and create an almost

unbreakable bond.

Lots of people assume that nails weren't used due to the time it took to make them.

Now we know different!

So fun to see this little piece of history

and wonder, based on what we read, how it was used

and what life was like at the turn of the 20th century.

And to realize that no matter how much technology we have

and how smart we think we are,

people a hundred years ago were still smarter.

Simply because they had to be.