About
Dry Timber
An independent guide to the engineering of covered timber bridges, written around the densest concentration of them in the country: Ashtabula County, Ohio.
The premise of the site is in its name. A timber truss left open to the weather decays at its joints within a couple of decades; the same truss kept dry carries traffic for a century or more. The roof, the siding, the ventilation gaps and the low portal are all consequences of that arithmetic, and the guides here are filed by what the structure is doing rather than by where it stands.
What is here
Twenty-two guides across five sections — The Roof, Trusses, Load, Building and Keeping Them — plus a register of the county’s covered spans listing truss type, watercourse, covered length and build year. Every entry names the truss and says what that truss solves.
What is not here
This is not a convention or visitors bureau, a tourism body or a preservation society. There is no visitor information on the site: no opening hours, no events, no tours, no accommodation, no driving routes. If you want to see a bridge, the county road system is public and a map is not our contribution.
Every entry names the truss and what that truss solves. The roof is treated as the engineering decision it was: timber lasts decades dry and years wet.
Sources and corrections
Dimensions and truss attributions come from published engineering records and county documents; approximate build years are marked as approximate rather than smoothed into certainty. Corrections are welcome and are made to the guide itself — see contact.