With its red and white paint, the Spencerville Covered Bridge, built in 1875, is just the way a covered bridge should look, notes author Maurice Williamson in a book on Indiana's covered bridges that's available through Electric Consumer.

Photo by Marsha Williamson Mohr

Maurice Williamson and Marsha Williamson Mohr, at the Adams Mill Covered Bridge in Carroll County, walk readers through portals to the past in their book on the state's covered bridges. Adams Mill, built in 1872, was restored in 1999.

Photo by Richard G. Biever

“Cross this bridge at a walk” is the saying that greets folks coming up to many of the old covered bridges. It’s usually painted up there in the gable, just below the name and date of the bridge.

Originally the words warned travelers on horseback or horse-drawn buggies and wagons to dismount and walk their animal across the bridge. The animal could be injured on weak or unsteady planks, or the bridge could be damaged if crossed at a faster pace.

"At a walk" seems to be the underlying theme of a new book featuring 92 of Indiana’s remaining covered bridges — and is also a little good advice for living from the book's author and photographer, a father-daughter duo from West Lafayette.

"Most people just hurry through life, hurryin' to nowhere," said Mauri Williamson, the writer.

The book, The Quiet Path: Covered Bridges of Indiana, invites readers to rein in their horses a bit, take a closer look at the sweet simple reminders of yesteryear, and enjoy life and nature around them.

"People have the time, they just don't think about it," said Marsha Williamson Mohr, Williamson's daughter, who photographed each bridge for the book. "This is important to me — slowing down, enjoying the beauty of the world and having quiet time."

Conceived by Mohr, a Tipmont REMC consumer, The Quiet Path takes readers on a journey of discovery to every significant surviving covered bridge in the state. It’s a unique coffee-table book because it's more than just a written and photographic record of each bridge, she said. The Quiet Path is a personal look at the bridges captured through Mohr's photography. It also includes poetry she penned.

Her dad complements the photographs with text on each bridge that goes beyond an analysis of the structure. Williamson delves into the people and the rural communities that built the bridges and the historical, cultural and even geologic and geographic make-up of the counties and countryside where each bridge is located.

Electric Consumer and Indiana's electric co-operative association are proud sponsors and distributors of the limited edition book which is being published and released by The Donning Company later this month.

"Since Indiana’s electric cooperatives provide electricity and other value-added services to rural and suburban communities all over the state — including most of the communities fortunate enough to lay claim to the covered bridges — we are particularly proud to play a role in producing this unique volume," said Emily Schilling, Electric Consumer editor.

Mohr is a nationally-published photographer who specializes in nature and rural structures: barns, mills and covered bridges. She has spent years gathering the photographs. Williamson was the executive secretary of the Purdue University Agriculture Alumni Association for 40 years. He is also the longtime manager of the Pioneer Village at the State Fair which preserves the rural lifestyle and agricultural ways of bygone days. He brought to the book his extensive knowledge and love of rural Indiana, its history and its people.

He uses that knowledge to paint a fuller picture of each bridge. "This work is one of love for the beauty of America and its natural and manmade setting rather than any kind of technical dissertation … of covered bridges," he wrote in the book's preface. "Surely, we understand and appreciate the superb engineering skills of those early builders …. This book, however, will dwell on the builder as an artist, not an engineer."

It was Williamson’s love of the American countryside that inspired his daughter to become a photographer. "He taught me how to enjoy life and nature," she said. She recalls two events from her childhood that shaped her future.

The first was a month-long family vacation out West back in the early 1960s. She and her parents and brother rode in the front seat of an International pickup truck; the back was topped with a homemade camper and stuffed with cots and boxes. With a little Brownie camera her parents bought her, she made black and white images of all the places along their Western odyssey: the Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Pacific Ocean to name a few. The photos earned her a blue ribbon at the county 4-H fair.

She also recalls an autumn visit to the Covered Bridge Festival in Parke County. While her dad talked to an acquaintance, she stood quietly as raindrops fell and admired the waterfall rushing past the Mansfield Mill with its giant wooden wheel turning. "I stood glaring out the window of the covered bridge at this scene, a beautiful sight. My roots were formed," she wrote.

Parke County, the covered bridge capital of Indiana, became a part of Mohr. "I can't explain my obsession to this region," she wrote in the book's forward. "That county with fields surrounded by hills, farmers working their plots, open meadows between lush woods, one-lane gravel roads meandering around the county like a spider web. I have to see mountains at least once a year. I have to see Parke County at least once every season."

Though Parke County, home to 32 bridges in the book, provided the initial inspiration, Mohr made it her personal quest in 1999 to photograph every historic covered bridge in the state. She said countless times she got lost trying to track down bridges; some were no longer to be found.

After getting photographs of all the bridges she knew about, she started thinking about publishing them in a book. One in-state publisher was interested. Then came Sept. 11 last year. The economic uncertainty that followed forced the publisher to drop a number of projects. One of them was hers.

Don Scott, a retired Purdue professor and plant pathologist and family friend, put her in touch with Donning, a niche publisher specializing in books on history and nostalgia. Donning had published Scott's two books on the barns of Indiana (the first of which was featured in Electric Consumer in November 1997). Following the success of the barn books, a book on covered bridges was just the kind of project Donning was looking for.

"It was just all perfect timing," Mohr said.
Mohr turned to her father, who had written the introduction to Scott's first barn book and parts of his second, to write the text. "She knew the bridges," he said. "I knew the countryside."

"This book … has long been Marsha's dream," he said. "When she asked me to write the text, I grabbed the opportunity. During my 40 years working at Purdue University, I wrote hundreds of treatises, promotional pieces, and magazine articles, but never a book. It has been a challenge, and I loved every moment of it."

Williamson, who calls himself "one of the last of the ruralists," wrote the book in pencil in his log cabin in Wayne County. His wife, June, who accompanied her daughter on many of her photographic excursions, typed up his hand-written text.

Williamson tells us that an estimated 10,000 covered bridges were built in America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Between 400 and 500 were built in Indiana. Less than 100 of those remain in Indiana today.

He said initially covered bridges were just a working part of the countryside. They were covered with roofs simply to shield the trusses, timbers and floor planks from the damaging effects of the elements. Depending on the region and the builder, some were more ornate than others. "Obviously, structural beauty was not the real reason for a covered bridge to be built. They were built to bind roads and pathways, a continuum of efficient travel. They leaped over fathomless chasms, quiet streams and wide rivers with one singular purpose — to get to the other side."

The development of iron bridges brought the end to the covered bridge. Iron bridges were easily built, allowed much heavier loads and were more economical to maintain. As covered bridges aged, they were replaced by the new iron structures (which now, too, are endangered).

"There were few proponents of the preservation of the historic old bridges," Williamson wrote. "Few county commissioners saw them as a thing of beauty. They rotted away, were victims of fire, flood and accidents. They usually were single lane and could not carry the heavy loads required by the burgeoning commerce. They stood squarely in the way of progress …. They had to go!"

Then, a kind of transmutation occurred. As more of these derelicts disappeared, people longing for the slower idyllic past started seeing them in a new romantic light. Their status changed.

"Just in time, individuals and organizations realized that there is more in this world than speed and technology," Williamson wrote. "Covered bridges have become, in the minds of folks who understand the value of beauty and history in our pastoral settings, icons of our heritage. They are the focal point of massive preservation efforts. Happily, we can now predict that most of the remaining covered bridges have been granted a new life in the American scene."

Williamson admits that the agrarian lifestyle of the past is probably over-romanticized. But romance creates interest, and interest leads to understanding and knowledge. History is preserved. Williamson said people need to know and understand where their food came from, yesterday and today. "I'm desperately interested in preserving the traditions of American agriculture."

Covered bridges were part of that. They helped get grain from the fields to the mills. Now they're part of something that's less tangible, but equally important. With arson destroying one and damaging another of Parke County's bridges earlier this year, Williamson said the landmarks need all the love we can give them.

"Covered bridges have precious little utility in a fast paced modern world," he wrote. "They are the nectar that acts as a catalyst to make the skies bluer, the grass greener and the place more beautiful in which to live."
In the beautiful color photographs, poetry and prose of their book, Williamson and Mohr have captured the flavor of these venerable and vulnerable bridges for readers willing to take a little walk through its pages … and into the past.

Choosing ‘The Quiet Path'
Title: The Quiet Path: Covered Bridges of Indiana
Authors: Marsha Williamson Mohr (photographs); Maurice Williamson (text)
Publisher: The Donning Company, Inc.
Sponsor: Electric Consumer and Indiana's electric cooperative association
Publication date: September 2002
Size: 160 pages (with approx. 225 color photos); 8.5x11 inches.
List price: $39.95 (plus Indiana sales tax)
Availability: The limited edition book is sponsored by Electric Consumer and the Indiana Statewide Association of RECs, Inc., and is available Through Electric Consumer and at some Barnes and Nobles Booksellers around Indiana.

To order send the following information:
• Number of copies @$47.35 each($39.95 for the book plus sales tax and shipping and handling charges),
• your name
• mailing address
• and a check to cover your total order. Make check payable to "Indiana Statewide Association of RECs."