Great Kinzua Bridge

By: Jim Gates

The Great Kinzua Bridge In May of 1882, 125 men gathered in the remote Kinzua Valley in northwestern Pennsylvania to build a railroad bridge, longer and taller than any bridge every built. In just 94 days they completed their mission--a 300-foot high viaduct nearly half a mile long now spanned the Kinzua Gorge. It was the largest bridge of its kind in the world. The industrial revolution fueled the need for even more coal and timber and the Kinzua Viaduct was rebuilt in steel in 1900 to handle the increased demand. Inspiring generations of engineers, builders, and dreamers, thousands of visitors from around the world flocked to this site. General Thomas Kane, Octave Chanute and Odo Valentine are just a few of the dreamers whose history is interwoven with the majestic splendor of the bridge. For more than a century, the Kinzua Bridge stood like a sentinel in the wilds of McKean County, Pennsylvania. When a tornado felled eleven of its twenty towers in 2003, a new Kinzua Bridge emerged, reincarnated as a skywalk within the Kinzua Bridge State Park, a monument to an age of astonishing entrepreneurship and engineering know-how. The Great Kinzua Bridge is a lavish pictorial history of this remarkable structure. With scores of previously unpublished archived and contemporary images, the book delves into the details of this astounding achievement. It's a fascinating, educational exploration of the formidable engineering skills displayed by its builders, and the implicit wealth of the natural resources locked within the Pennsylvania wilderness.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0977065723
• ISBN13: 9780977065721
• Release Date: August 2012
• Publisher: Forest Press
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 9.0" x 6.0"