Restoration of Wooden Bridge in Wawona Marks an Old Craft

by Melanie Turner
Modesto Bee - June 18, 2004

Families cross over the refurbished Wawona bridge Thursday. The bridge was built in 1868 and by 2000, several support beams showed signs of failure. Eight craftsmen used 19th century tools to restore it. Mark Crosse / The Fresno Bee

To restore a wooden bridge built across the Merced River in 1868, a crew of eight craftsmen used 19th century tools -- and modern ones, too.

The finished product, two summers in the making, opened last winter.

A dedication ceremony took place Thursday at this outpost just inside
the Yosemite National
Park boundary at the park's southern tip.

Authorities closed the covered bridge in 2000.

Several large support beams showed signs of failure then, and the bridge sagged 8 inches in the middle.

Yosemite's Heritage Structure Preservation Team went to work on restoring the bridge, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Craig Struble, park restoration specialist, noted that hewing round logs into square timbers is a lost art.

Some timbers in the bridge span about 100 feet.

"There's no sawmill that can handle timbers of that size. They weigh almost a ton." So the craftsmen used special axes to produce new timbers.

The crew made steady progress, despite 13 inches of rainfall that pushed the river to flood stage in November 2002, sweeping construction scaffolding downstream.

When Galen Clark built the bridge, he built it without a roof.

The roof came in 1878 -- and it stayed with the restoration.

The Wawona bridge, just off Highway 41, is one of two covered bridges owned by the National Park Service, said Yosemite Superintendent Michael Tollefson, and one of 13 in California.

Struble said the park service paid for the Wawona bridge project with a $100,000 grant from the Yosemite Fund, about $275,000 in federal money for historic preservation projects and about $50,000 in park service funds set aside to preserve cultural resources.