Hollingshead Covered Bridge

About

Hollingshead Covered Bridge No. 40 crosses Catawissa Creek in Catawissa Township, Columbia County, east of Catawissa Borough. It is a Burr arch truss bridge 116.9 ft long, with a total length of 117.1 ft in coveredbridges.net's specifications. It carries Old Reading Road near its junction with Mountain Road. It was built for road traffic, but no source found confirms whether it is open to vehicles today.

History

Peter Ent built the bridge in 1851 for $1,180. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 29, 1979, and was rehabilitated in 1999. In August 2022 a truck driver who left the scene smashed the supports that connect the sidewalls to the roof. FOX56 reported that a white box truck damaged the right side supports and main beams, and that Old Reading Road was closed from Sycamore Drive to Mountain Road until an inspection could check the bridge's stability. The sources found do not say when the road reopened.

Design

The Burr arch truss pairs a long timber arch with a multiple kingpost truss. Hollingshead has a largest span of 104 ft, a 13.5 ft wide deck, 9 ft of vertical clearance above the deck, and a tarred metal roof.

Visiting

The bridge is on Old Reading Road off Mountain Road, east of Catawissa. Its current traffic status after the 2022 damage could not be confirmed from the sources found.

Sources: Hollingshead Covered Bridge (coveredbridges.net), Hit-and-run driver damages covered bridge in Catawissa Twp. (FOX56), Hit-and-run driver damages covered bridge (Press Enterprise)

Photo: Ruhrfisch, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.