Customer Reviews

Pennsylvania's Covered Bridges: A Complete Guide

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This new and revised edition of the 1993 publication has expanded text and very precise directions for locating every one of the remaining 221 covered bridges in Pennsylvania. This is a "must have" volume for the serious "bridger." The authors revisited every one of the bridges taking new photographs, accurate measurements, and noting specific changes that have taken place since the first edition. This new edition also displays every bridge in full color.

Wooden covered bridges are found all over the American northeast. The first covered bridge built in the United States was over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania still remains the state with the most surviving covered bridges in the country. Now in a completely updated and expanded second edition, Pennsylvania's Covered Bridges: A Complete Guide is the collaborative effort of Benjamin and June Evans. Criss-crossing the length and breadth of Pennsylvania, the authors visited every one of the 221 remaining covered bridges in the summer of 2000, taking new photographs and noting changes that had taken place since 1993 -- the year they published their guidebook's first edition. An indispensable guide for anyone wanting to tour these historical structures, Pennsylvania's Covered Bridges is superbly illustrated with color photographs of each bridge, while the text provides location and historical data, along with a succinct one paragraph description.

This book gives a good bit of detail and history about Covered Bridges in Pennsylvania. The types of structures is very well covered. However, the directions to finding the bridges are difficult to follow. The authors rely heavily on township designations and township route numbers to pinpoint locations. I recently used this book to find several bridges and found the directions here could get me close but township route markers are not always available, it is difficult to get township maps for every township in the state. I had to rely on road markings such as: Low weight limit signs, narrow bridge signs, and low speed limit signs on the roads the bridges were located

This new edition is a much improved version of the previous edition. Contrary to another review here, I still do not find the directions that good. While they are much better than the last edition, they come no where close to as good as the Barna book on bridges in Vermont. I have used this book to track several bridges and found distances listed can be off by as much as 2 to 3 miles compared to the book. Still it is an improvement and you don't need to have township maps of the whole state anymore.

I ordered this book for a annual trip. We toured covered bridges in 4 states. This book was a nice size for travel but mainly had information about what the writers saw. I also purchased Covered Bridges - Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia. This book was much more interesting as it contained information on the history of the bridge, not just the state of the bridge when seen.

This book was bought for my husband for Christmas..The pictures are very pretty and it gives good discriptions of each bridge and location..