Ron Knapp, born in Pennsylvania, educated in Florida and Pennsylvania, and living in New York State for more than half a century, taught at the State University of New York, New Paltz, from 1968 to 2001. As a specialist in Historical/Cultural Geography, he is the author or editor of more than 20 books concerning China’s vernacular architecture and books dealing with Southeast Asia and the United States. One of his recent publications is “In Search of America’s Old Covered Bridges,” Built Heritage (2021) https://doi.org/10.1186/s43238-021-00028-8
Knapp and Miller are co-authors of America’s Covered Bridges: Practical Crossing, Nostalgic Icons (2014) and China’s Covered Bridges: Architecture Over Water with Liu Jie (2019) as well as the 525-page book Theodore Burr and the Bridging of Early America: The Man, Fellow Bridge Builders, and Their Forgotten Timber Spans (2023) https://www.amazon.com/Theodore-Burr-Bridging-Early-America/dp/1916787835/
Presentation
Reevaluating Theodore Burr (1771-1822), 'His Bridges', and the Early Bridging of America
Theodore Burr (1771-1822) was the most prominent of America's three early nineteenth-century timber bridge-building pioneers, the others being Timothy Palmer (1751-1821) and Lewis Wernwag (1769-1843).
All three built superlative long-span timber bridges.
A transplant from Connecticut, Theodore Burr moved to Oxford, New York, in 1792-1793. In less than thirty years, he erected timber bridges over major rivers--the Mohawk, Hudson, Schoharie, Delaware, Potomac, and Susquehanna Rivers - in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, the District of Columbia, and Maryland.
Richard Sanders Allen, the pioneering researcher of America’s covered bridges, established a modest baseline of information about Burr in 1943. Later authors generally depended on earlier authors by repeating what had become a fixed conventional wisdom replete with erroneous or unfounded assumptions even as the broad outlines were reasonably accurate.
Our talk—derived from our book—reevaluates Theodore Burr in order to correct contradictions, misassumptions, and baseless conclusions concerning timber bridge building during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The book also narrates the role of timber bridges and associated turnpikes in the westward expansion of the new nation, a subject never before written about. The book should help refocus scholarship on advances in transportation infrastructure during one of the most important periods in American history.
Based on archival research with newly discovered primary source materials, the book is richly illustrated with more than 200 lithographs, paintings, and both historic and modern photographs, most of which have never been published before. Many will be presented in the talk,
Anyone today who has visited America's covered bridges and examined the structural features within is likely familiar with the variant forms of Burr's 1817 patented "Burr arch-truss" design - a multiple kingpost truss with an added segmented timber arch. Of the more than 1,100 timber bridges using Burr's design that were erected over the past two hundred years, more than a hundred still stand in Pennsylvania, Indiana, New York, and other states.
Burr claimed to have built forty-five bridges. These however were not like the ordinary covered bridges seen today that are identified with his patent but include some of the most challenging and superlative bridges in American history.
Despite Burr's herculean efforts, part of his legacy sadly includes an obscure and ignominious demise in 1822 at the age of 51, possibly by then penniless and without even an obituary lauding his work. He was buried in an unknown grave. Burr deserved better.