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| From Hurricane Shoals Park |
Now there’s something about a covered bridge that transports some of us to a different time and place. They are highly romanticized. But what is it about them? Is it their age? I ask this because I see a small trend in Modern Covered Bridge Building and wonder if it deserves the same notice as the old ladies that stand guard atop our Georgia Rivers. I tend to lend toward thinking so, and thus the story of the Hurricane Shoals Covered Bridge in Maysville, GA.
To be fair, it wasn’t like the folks of Jackson County just up and decided to build a new modern covered bridge one day. This new bridge is built on the site of the “Old” Hurricane Shoals Covered Bridge (photo here) erected way back in 1882, when the area had need of a bridge for the nearby mills. That 127 foot town lattice style bridge was burned to the ground after 9 decades of service by heartless vandals on Memorial Day of 1972.
After years of effort, funding was made available to rebuild this bridge in 2002. The bridge has the same dimensions and style but is clearly built with modern know-ho. This re-envisioning of the romantic countryside sentry is definitely an interesting object to contemplate for a moment. How many great things of the past can we actually improve on? Or does this modernism diminish its aesthetic purpose? I won’t answer these questions for you, but I do promise to show a few other modern bridges on this site in the future.
This bridge stands as a connector between the two parts of Hurricane Shoals Park in Maysville. On one side you have the tumbling waters of the North Oconee River and the other you have the old building of their pioneer village, which were discussed at length in previous articles.
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| From Hurricane Shoals Park |
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