Punch it, Cody. Just punch it. That sign doesn't mean a thing. Tessa Hulcom was in tennis whites and a pink visor, waving a 26-tonon Hulcom paving dump truck across my covered bridge, a structure rated for 10,000 lb. The bridge was named Carver Mill Bridge.
My great-grandfather built it in 1923. My father rebuilt it in 2008, 8 months before he taught me how to drive a piling. The dump truck weighed five times the posted limit. My 11-year-old daughter, Tully, had warned Tessa 6 hours earlier to stay away from our property. Tessa had not listened.
The first crack came at 6 m an hour. The second came when the rear axle broke through the deck planks 32 ft past the south portal. I did not yell. I did not move. I just stepped behind a cedar stump and watched the dashboard come up green.
14 agencies, 22 minutes from first crack to federal handcuffs. My name is Brennan Carver. I'm 44 years old and I'm the third generation of Carver men to keep a covered bridge standing on Sourwood Creek in Haywood County, North Carolina. The bridge is 156 ft long, single span town lattis truss design with cedar shake siding stained the same dark red my great-grandfather Augustus Carver mixed by hand in 1923. He built it from white oak he cut on the back of his own farm with his brothers in 71 days.
He built it because the only crossing across Sourwood Creek had been a washed out wagon Ford that had taken the life of a neighbor named Esau Lynn during a March flood. Augustus did not believe a man should drown trying to get home. My grandfather, Cyrus Carver, looked after the bridge for 48 years. My father, Wendell Carver, rebuilt it in 2008 after a do took out the South Truss with materials I helped him source and load. He passed in February of last year.
Heart attack on a Saturday morning, mowing the upstream bank with a push mower he had owned since 1991. He was 68 years old. He was halfway down the second pass when his heart stopped. 2 days after his funeral, I drove down to the bridge alone and put my forehead on the cedar siding and stood there until my hands stopped shaking. The bridge smelled like cedar tar and creek water and the inside of my father's truck.
And I think I understood standing there that I had inherited a job nobody else in Hwood County was qualified to do. The bridge has a posted weight limit, 5 tons, 10,000 lb. Anybody who has ever loaded a pickup with a yard of gravel knows that's more than enough for ordinary residential traffic, but well below anything commercial. The engineering is right. My father redid the load calculations himself with consulting work from a Tennessee professor named Eldred Ashb who specialized in historic timber spans.
The 5-tonon limit is not arbitrary. It is the safe number. I am a North Carolina licensed professional engineer. I run Carver Engineering Services out of a converted feed store in Wesville. My specialty is historic bridge restoration.