Forksville Covered Bridge

Forksville Covered Bridge

Forksville Covered Bridge is a Burr arch truss covered bridge over Loyalsock Creek in the borough of Forksville, Sullivan County, in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It was built in 1850 and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The bridge was restored in 1970 and 2004 and is still in use, with average daily traffic of 240 vehicles in 2014.

About Forksville Covered Bridge in brief

Summary Forksville Covered BridgeForksville Covered Bridge is a Burr arch truss covered bridge over Loyalsock Creek in the borough of Forksville, Sullivan County, in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It was built in 1850 and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The bridge was restored in 1970 and 2004 and is still in use, with average daily traffic of 240 vehicles in 2014. It is one of three remaining covered bridges in Sullivan County. Pennsylvania had the first covered bridge in the United States and the most such bridges in both the 19th and 21st centuries. In 2001, Pennsylvania had more surviving historic covered bridges than any other state, with 221 remaining in 40 of its 67 counties. There were only five covered bridges left by 1954, and as of 2011 only three remain. All three are Burr arch truss covered bridges and were built in 1840s or 1850s. The name of the bridge comes from the community of Fork’sville, which is on land first settled in 1794, and was laid out as a village in 1854. It served as the site of a stream gauge from 1908 to 1913. The United States Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration uses it as the model of a covered bridge \”classic gable roof\”, and it serves as the logo of a Pennsylvania insurance company.

A load-bearing arch sandwiching multiple vertical king posts, for strength and rigidity, makes the bridge stronger and more rigid than other types of covered bridges. A Burr arch-truss structure consists of a load- bearing arch sandwiched multiple king posts. The roof and enclosed sides protected some of these bridges to survive for well over a century. In 19th-century Pennsylvania, lumber was an abundant resource for bridge construction, but did not last long when exposed to the elements. Pennsylvania is estimated to have once had at least 1,500 covered bridges, and is believed to have had the most in the country between 1830 and 1875. The first coveredBridge in the US was built over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1800, and it is believed that it was the first of its kind in the world. The current bridge was built by Sadler Rogers, 18, who used his hand-carved model of the structure. He was only 18 at the time and used the model to supervise the bridge’s construction before it was built for the first time in 1849. It’s located about 0.2 miles south of Pennsylvania Route 87 and 2.0 miles north of Worlds End State Park on PA 154.