When Theodore Burr traveled in 1792-1793 from Litchfield, Connecticut, to Oxford in Chenango County, NY — a distance of some 200 miles — with his carpenter friend Jonathan Baldwin from neighboring Massachusetts, Burr considered himself a carpenter/millwright/housewright like his father.
As a carpenter, he had experience creating structures that would span broad open spaces using some form of a roof truss, that is, a triangular frame comprising level beams and oblique timbers jointed together. There is no record that either he, his father, or friend had ever erected a bridge before arriving in New York State.
Yet, less than a decade after coming as a Yankee migrant and with neither training nor experience in building wooden bridges, Burr began erecting bridges in 1800 at Oxford and another at Esperance before constructing a third one in 1802 at Catskill.
None of these were covered bridges. Burr was soon to erect experimental arched structures at Canajoharie in 1803 and Schenectady in 1803 and 1808.
Each of Burr’s first three bridges crossed a fairly narrow stream: Chenango River in Oxford; Schoharie Creek at Esperance; and Catskill Creek at the Hudson River port of Catskill.
Meanwhile, Burr was already seeking work at a distance from Oxford that would cross broader rivers like the Mohawk and Hudson in New York, then later the Delaware, Potomac, and Susquehanna farther south that subsequently came to define his professional life and bring him fame.
There were possibly other bridges still unknown to us today that Burr built as he was embarking on his new, increasingly busy, occupation as a bridgewright. Substantial evidence reveals that he was also training others as bridgebuilders, more than a handful from Oxford and nearby towns.
Many of them subsequently worked with him erecting major bridges in New York and Pennsylvania until Burr’s death at 51 in 1822. These associated bridgebuilders and those local laborers who worked with them deserve a separate essay.
Few of Burr’s earliest timber bridges are remembered today by locals or even mentioned in county and town histories. Indeed, his earliest bridges between 1800 and 1802 are rarely mentioned as parts of Burr’s bridgebuilding oeuvre, likely because they were less significant than his fabled, and often quite experimental, bridges that came later.
Unfortunately, and, so far, no handwritten contracts or drawings for Burr’s earliest bridges have surfaced even after diligent efforts to locate them. If found, they would provide structural as well as other construction details that would settle what we currently do not know.
Although there are no known depictions of Burr’s earliest bridges when they were erected, subsequent re-buildings are illustrated in historical records. Details of the structure of early bridges by Burr and others, as mentioned, are scanty.
It is nonetheless likely that they used the most common structural types at the time: post and beam/stringer, trestle supported, or a combination of these simple forms.
Trestle bridges, which were more elaborate than those simply held up by post and beams, comprised vertical posts, usually slanted, that had interior timber bracing.
The frames could be made on river banks, then moved to the stream where they could be pounded into the river bottom. Once in place, they were connected on the top with beams and planking as a supportive framework for the deck.
Soon after Burr’s arrival in Oxford in 1793, he and Jonathan Baldwin were granted approval to build a dam and then an associated gristmill along the Chenango River, which not coincidentally were near the location of his 1800 bridge, which is usually considered to have been his first.
Burr constructed this relatively short bridge with Baldwin. The crossing came to be known as the “Old Mill” bridge since it was near the mill and dam Burr and Baldwin had constructed earlier.
After Burr’s death in 1822 when the Oxford Bridge needed replacing, Baldwin, who had continued to live in Oxford after Burr departed for Pennsylvania a decade earlier, accomplished this in 1823.
The preparations and construction of this replacement bridge are described in great detail as a “River Bridge Bee.” Baldwin, Thomas Brown, who was another of Burr’s bridgebuilding collaborators, and community leaders organized even citizens from neighboring towns to secure stone for the rebuilt abutments and piers for a longer bridge:
In order to intensify the pro bono publico spirit which would prompt a general acceptance of the invitation to men with teams, on the laborious occasion, the committee resolved to celebrate the day, and at the same time provide substantial beef rations, by roasting an immense ox of a frame or spit, after the manner of a grand barbecue. Building occurred on February 28, 1823 that culminated in a feast with “a fat ox” as the centerpiece.
According to the 1900 Annals of Oxford, this effort was memorialized in official town documents with an added admonition that “drones, poachers, and interlopers, whose only object is sport, will not be fed.”
The description of the day’s activities in the Annals of Oxford underscores that liberal amounts of “cider and whisky… Amid frantic yells for more beef… a jovial horde… rushed merrily singing across the bridge.”
This timber bridge was rebuilt two more times, each time lengthening it, but likely keeping the form of its original timber structure as erected by Burr and Baldwin in 1800.
Periodic storms and freshets in 1842 and 1853 caused much damage to timber bridges in Oxford and nearby. An 1842 engraving of the growing village of Oxford depicts Burr and Baldwin’s rebuilt bridge, which was said to be the fourth on the site.
The prosperity of Oxford is reinforced by its many prominent buildings and its changing transportation geography. In the foreground, mules tow a canal boat along the Chenango Canal, which passed through Oxford in 1836.
The Chenango Canal ran from Binghamton on the Susquehanna River to Utica along the Erie Canal in the north, connecting Oxford and its hinterland to the commercial world beyond.
It is not clear from available records when the successor timber bridge across Chenango River was finally replaced with an iron bridge. An iron bridge across the adjacent Chenango Canal was lost in August 1850 because of the weight of a drove of cattle.
A century later, after the canal was abandoned, a through truss metal bridge was erected in 1953 and rehabilitated in 1990, then replaced with the unexceptional reinforced concrete stringer bridge in place today.
Mounted on a stone base near the current bridge at Oxford is a plaque with confused information about Oxford’s Master Builder, Theodore Burr.
First, is the incorrect date — 1802 – for the bridge erected by Burr and Baldwin. Second, is what is implied by including the drawing of the design for Burr’s 1817 patent, which was not used in 1800. Burr’s arch-truss structure was not employed by him until near the end of his life in 1822.
Ronald G. Knapp and Terry E. Miller are the authors of Theodore Burr and the Bridging of Early America: The Man, Fellow Bridge Builders, and Their Forgotten Timber Spans (2023).
This essay is sponsored by the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges. It’s part of a series of essays about covered bridges in New York State – you can read them all here.
Illustrations, from above: Map of Chenango County, NY, 1897; Notice of the Oxford, bridge building bee from Henry Galpin’s Annals of Oxford, New York: With Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Early Pioneers, 1906; “Central part of the Village of Oxford,” from John Warner Barber and Henry Howe’s Historical Collections of the State of New Yorke, 1842; and the Theodore Burr plaque (photo by Ronald G. Knapp).
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