The Bridges of Juniata County

I was cleaning out a portion of an upstairs bedroom in the house I grew up in. This section of bedroom was piled high with all manner of… stuff: pictures, window shades, board games, a stamp collection, dishes, metal shelves, and so much more. My father had been a pack rat. He oftentimes rode his bicycle down the long hill to Rensselaer High School, where he taught Industrial Arts for over fifty years. On his way home, back up that hill, he sometimes saw items left by the side of the road. “That shouldn’t go to waste,” he would tell himself, pick up the item and carry it home, yes, on his bike. My father passed away in December 2020, a surprise victim of Covid.

Here I was, back at the family house after being away for a year and a half. I was cleaning out the back of that bedroom. My son Adam came up the steps and asked what I was doing. “I’m cleaning out a path to the closet,” I said.

“There’s a closet back there?” he asked, shocked.

“Yes, and I believe it leads to Narnia.”

I handed him some framed pictures, since he wanted to help, and noticed the one on top. It was a hand-painted scene of a covered bridge on a crisp, autumn day. On the back side, in Dad’s impeccable printing, were the words, “Celebrating good memories of a search for the five covered bridges of Juniata County. -Dad- 1995.”

“What’s that?” Adam asked.

I had never seen the picture before in my life, but I knew what it referred to. I was surprised at the artwork since I had never known Dad to paint on a canvas. He was a master at woodwork, creating jewelry boxes, lamps, and other well-crafted wooden keepsakes, but I’d never seen him lift a paintbrush for anything besides beautifying a house.

The painting and Dad’s message on the back sent me back 25 years, to that Autumn weekend in Juniata County, Pennsylvania. We’re part owners of a farmhouse there, back in a holler with no access to the road except through the neighbor’s driveway. The house was purchased by Absalom Barner Jr., my great grandfather, in the 1880s. Yes, it’s older than that. We spent entire weeks down there, planted a thousand trees once on the hillside above, attended family reunions nearby, and learned and lived our family history deep in those Appalachian hills near the Susquehanna Valley. But that was my childhood, and the Pennsylvania Farm became a memory during my turbulent twenties.

By 1995, I had been away from the Pennsylvania farmhouse for over five years. I was a Senior at Utica College, studying Journalism. Life gave me college then a year in Missouri, followed by more college. I was in my final semester and my main assignment for Magazine Writing class was to think up an article, contact a magazine, then write for that magazine. I had no article ideas and I sat on the assignment for half the semester, as was my way. When I finally took a good look at the class syllabus, I had a couple days to contact a magazine and two weeks to write an article I had failed to think of yet. Ack!

I went to the library and perused a reference book listing existing magazines and how to contact them. There were thousands of them, but I passed “Aviation Week,” “Boys’ Life,” and “Chemical and Engineering News,” and settled on “Covered Bridge Digest.” I never knew such a magazine existed. I could write about the many covered bridges near the farmhouse in Pennsylvania. They would be sure to publish my work. After all, how many people write about covered bridges?

I called the contact number for the magazine and pitched my idea. They were interested. The next step was to set up a trip to Pennsylvania. I called dear old Dad. He loved the idea of heading down to the farmhouse with his son.

On a cold, overcast November morning, I drove home to Albany and Dad and I got in his car for the five hour journey down to Juniata County. I don’t know if I had ever been alone in a car with Dad for that long a time. As the youngest of nine kids, to be alone with Dad had been a rarity. I was the youngest, with six years between myself and my next sibling. Dad told stories on the way down about how he met Mom, and the fiftieth Barner Reunion which he chaired in the early seventies, even inviting the President. Nixon had sent a personalized letter for the occasion. Mom had written a song for us to sing in front of the Barner Church at the reunion.

Here are the words: “In Pennsylvania, in Perry County, on Barner Hill there is a place so still, where the birds and the bees are a humming and a singing and the gentle breezes blow. There is a little brick church so quaint and solemn. Trees blossom green in stately columns and across the way is a cemetery, with names like Adam, Absalom, and Sarah Barner.”

Dad also talked of family history and asked about college.

We had a timetable to keep. Dad had thought more of the assignment than I had. Our first goal was to reach the Juniata County government offices in Mifflintown before they closed. We needed information about the covered bridges in the county. We didn’t use the internet back then, so this was our prime information source, and we were close to the time they closed. They wouldn’t reopen until Monday, when I would be back at college. We made it, parked the car, and walked through the rain to the downtown government office. They gave us a pamphlet of the five covered bridges. Dad struck up a conversation with an Amish man who was standing by the door.

North Oriental (Beaver) Covered Bridge

When I think of a covered bridge, this is it. The Beaver Bridge is the first one I ever knew, located about five miles from the farmhouse and well-kept. The road goes right over the bridge so you can drive through it, and we had done that many times while driving to my aunt’s house. Dad parked the car by this bridge even before we headed to the farmhouse to unload our bags.

I read a plaque placed on the bridge during the latest refurbishment. Built in 1908, It is a single Burr-Truss bridge that spans the Mahantango Creek and links Juniata County with Snyder County. I didn’t know what a Burr-Truss was, but I dutifully jotted down the information and took some pictures with black-and-white film. The smart thing to do would have been to research what Burr-Truss meant, but I never did.

We climbed back into the car, drove back to the four-corners town of Oriental, turned down a side road, and headed to the farmhouse. Light was fading, so the other covered bridges would wait.

The white, old house was built on a steep hillside, so even though both porches were on the first floor, the front porch was level with the two-track packed-earth driveway, and the back porch was reached by a wooden staircase next to the stone wall of the basement. We took our bags inside, and up the narrow staircase to our musty-smelling rooms. It was a smell that brought me back to my childhood, when Grampa was alive and the house was full of relations. Now it was just Dad and me. For the first time I noticed how old the furnishings and décor were, with Sixties wallpaper and a speckled linoleum floor in the kitchen that was possibly laid down in the Forties. Even the refrigerator had the curves of ancient days. Dad led me down to the basement and showed me how to fire up the furnace and turn on the water pump. It would take a few minutes for us to have hot water. We then left to find some dinner.

The nearest decent-sized community to Oriental was Liverpool. It was a Susquehanna river town that straddled busy Routes 11 and 15. We found a restaurant and I believe we were the only patrons. Dad treated me to dinner that night and we made our plans for the following day, a long one.

Schaeffer Covered Bridge

I had trouble sleeping that night on the old bed. We awoke on Saturday morning to another dismal day. Dad whistled an indecipherable tune, as was his way. He put on an English cabby hat and his overcoat. At least it wasn’t raining. He drove us back to Oriental and parked in the general store lot. There was a covered bridge even closer to the farmhouse than the Beaver Bridge. We walked down the road behind the general store, then stopped on a bridge. This one was not covered, but the creek it crossed hosted another bridge about 200 yards away, the Schaeffer Covered Bridge.

This bridge was not kept up as well as the Beaver Bridge. If you didn’t know to look for it, you just might miss it. It also crossed the Mahantango Creek between Juniata and Snyder County. Dad and I walked along the creek to the bridge and stepped inside. We could only go so far. The bridge was full of planks of wood, tools, lawnmowers, and other things stored. There was no plaque.

Dad told me I should knock on a door nearby and ask about the bridge. I didn’t want to, feeling sheepish, but Dad pushed for me to, so I walked up to the door and knocked. A woman answered. I told her about the magazine article I was writing and asked about the bridge. The woman told me that the Schaeffer Bridge was half owned by her, and half by the property owners on the opposite side of the creek, who used it as a storage shed. She wanted to fix it up, as it was in deteriorating condition. The neighbors said no, so the bridge slowly crumbled.

The Schaeffer Bridge was a single-truss built in 1907. It’s the shortest of the Juniata covered bridges and is amazingly still standing, without any refurbishment efforts. Sadly, the next bridge we visited no longer stands.

The Dimmsville Bridge

The route to our next stop brought us down a road I had never been down, ten or more miles away. Juniata is a small county, sandwiched between Appalachian Mountain ridges. Unlike the two red bridges we had already viewed, The Dimmsville Bridge was white. Like many covered bridges, commerce bypassed it. The road crosses a newer bridge and left the covered one on a side spur road, forgotten. It was on private property but it wasn’t posted, so we parked the car and walked right up to it to take pictures and do quick research.

The Dimmsville Bridge was built in 1902 and spans 100 feet over Cocolamus Creek. It looked just fine in 1995, but collapsed in 2017. Now there are only four covered bridges in Juniata County. Here’s a bit of trivia. One reason they covered bridges was because it kept the horses from looking down at the raging water below and getting spooked.

Port Royal (Lehman’s) Covered Bridge

We drove a while after the Dimmsville Bridge. Oriental is on the extreme eastern tip of Juniata County, hence the name Oriental. Port Royal was in the middle of the county, and no road led straight to it. But the countryside was gorgeous, with the leaves gold, orange, and red, the rolling hillsides, and the not-so-distant mountain ridges following us and leading us along. Port Royal was a village of colonial and Victorian homes with a rustic downtown located on the Juniata River.

The Lehman’s Bridge was off a side road. It linked the town to a private residence across the East Licking Creek. Built in 1888, Hurricane Agnes destroyed it in 1972. The Lehman family rebuilt it but didn’t paint it to keep a rustic appearance. We took pictures along the bridge, and listened to the gurgling creek below before returning to the car and heading off to the final, and most notable, of Juniata’s covered bridges.

Academia-Pomeroy Bridge

We left Port Royal and drove seven miles down twisting, backcountry roads. The last wound down into another valley before turning onto a longer bridge. To our right, clearly visible, was the 278-foot-long Academia-Pomeroy Bridge, the longest covered bridge in Pennsylvania. Dad pulled off onto a side road and parked, although there wasn’t a parking lot, and we walked up to the bridge.

The Juniata County Historical Society had erected a big sign detailing how the bridge had been built across the Tuscarora Creek in 1902 to replace an earlier bridge from 1870. First, I gazed down the long, dark center of the bridge at the sunlit opening on the distant side. Naturally, I had to walk the entire expanse, then look up at the road that ascended the hill on the opposite bank and imagine where it went. Perhaps I even imagined a horse-drawn wagon coming down that hill, returning from market to the driver’s farm.

We returned the miles back across the county, veering onto a different road that led to Liverpool. Dad found a small eatery that probably sat twenty in the dining area, if they borrowed chairs from the Elks Club next door. We sat down and picked something from the menu. Dinner took about an hour to come, or so it seemed. As we sat there making small talk, planning my story, and recalling the events of the trip, hunters sat eating their own dinners, coming in from the cold, and saying hello to the waitress and cook they knew by name. Dad was happy to be back in the country where he had spent his summers as a child, where the locals called him “Junior,” where he took Mom on their honeymoon and relatives stopped by the farmhouse in the middle of their first night together, honking horns and yelling hurrahs. Dinner finally came, we ate, then returned to the farmhouse. I slept like a baby on a good night.

Through the years I almost forgot about that weekend, until Dad reminded me years later. He remembered it fondly, a wonderful Autumn outing with his youngest son.

In September of 2021, I took my youngest son to Pennsylvania. We stood on Barner Hill with relatives, reciting memories of Harry Barner, my father, by his graveside. We passed around the box containing his ashes drawing memories upon it before setting the box in the ground. I had my nephew draw a picture of a covered bridge on the container since I didn’t trust my own artistry.

On our way back to Ohio, I took a long detour to the west side of the county. We rode down a winding road into the valley of the Tuscarora Creek, where I pulled off on a side road and parked, although there was still no lot. My younger son said he just wanted to stay in the car, but I coaxed him out, and he walked down with me to the longest covered bridge in Pennsylvania. Harry Barner’s youngest son took his youngest son down to see the Academia-Pomeroy Bridge. My son stood for a moment looking down that long shaft, held his breath for a moment, then returned to the car. It meant more to me than it did to him … for now.

Image by Harry Barner.