Sonestown Covered Bridge
The Sonestown Covered Bridge is a covered bridge over Muncy Creek in Davidson Township, Sullivan County, Pennsylvania built around 1850. It was built to provide access to a grist mill which operated until the early 20th century. The bridge is a Burr arch truss type with a load-bearing arch sandwiching multiple vertical king posts for strength and rigidity. Pennsylvania had the first covered bridge in the United States and has the most of any state in the 21st century.
About Sonestown Covered Bridge in brief
The Sonestown Covered Bridge is a covered bridge over Muncy Creek in Davidson Township, Sullivan County, Pennsylvania built around 1850. It was built to provide access to a grist mill which operated until the early 20th century. The bridge is a Burr arch truss type with a load-bearing arch sandwiching multiple vertical king posts for strength and rigidity. Pennsylvania had the first covered bridge in the United States and has the most of any state in the 21st century. In 2001, Pennsylvania had more surviving historic covered bridges than any other state, with 221 remaining in 40 of its 67 counties. Although there were 30 covered bridges in Sullivan County in 1890, only five were left by 1954, and as of 2020 only three remain: Sonestown, Hillsgrove, and Sonstown. At the time of its construction, the bridge was the fifth covered bridge to be built in the county, which was also home to Johnny Hazen’s gristmill, which also was built in 1850. As of 2020 the bridge is open only to pedestrian traffic and has a sufficiency rating of only 21.3 percent on the National Bridge Inventory. It is named for the nearby unincorporated village of SonestOWN, which is 1 mile north of the bridge on Route 220, giving the bridge its name. The area that became Davidson Township was first settled in 1806, and was incorporated as a township in 1833. Within the township, George Sones built a sawmill and founded the unincorporated village of sonestown in 1843.
All of these events occurred before Sullivan County was formed from part of Lycoming County on March 14, 1847. The bridge was repaired in 1969 and after flood damage in 1996, 2005, 2013, and 2020. It was also restored in 2001, but its condition was deemed ‘basically intolerable requiring high priority of corrective action’ as of 2016. In 1996, the village had a few stores and an inn with a restaurant, attracting tourists and hunters. The village was then home to a plant that manufactured the staves for making barrels. It had a clothespin factory from 1903 to 1929 but lost almost all industry by the 1930s. In 19th-century Pennsylvania, lumber was an abundant resource for bridge construction, but wood 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 roof and enclosed sides of covered bridges protected the elements, allowing these bridges to survive for well over a century. A Burr archtruss type consists of a load bearing arch and multiple king posts, resulting in a stronger and more rigid structure than one made of either cast iron or steel alone. The covered bridge is 110 ft long and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and is on U.S. Route 220.
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This page is based on the article Sonestown Covered Bridge published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 02, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
