01/03/2026
Words from Lemuel Chenoweth's great grand daughter about the Beverly Covered Bridge from her diary "A Penny a Bucket." This is a treasure mom found in dad's collection.
"If we'd walk down the side street toward the river we would soon come to the covered bridge. It was of tremendously sturdy construction with huge wooden arch on each side, stretching majestically from one end of the span to the other.
it was build by my great-grandfather Lemuel Chenoweth, who was the builder of many such wooden bridges in Virginia, which then included what is now both Virginia and West Virginia.
When he was submitting his bid for the contract to the State Road Commission, he built a small model of his proposed bridge and carried it on horse-back over mountains to the State Capitol at Richmond. There he demonstrated his bridge's strength by placing the model as a span between two chair seats and jumping up and down on it.
We understood the reasons for the covered bridges was to enable them to resemble barns, so that the horses would go through them. This bridge stood strong and secure through a century of change. Its wall echoed with the sounds of travelers on foot and on horseback. Horse-drawn carriages rolled over its great floor beams, and then came the first automobiles whose chugging echoed as loudly as did the horses' "clip-clop."
If coming into town through the bridge, all travelers had to come to an abrupt halt at the town end of the bridge to look and listen for the train. The tracks ran very close to the bridge, whose planks made a great clattering as traffic went over them, and whose solid gray walls hid everything from the traveler's view until he emerged form the bridges protection.
Several generations of children climbed over the great arches trying to be brave enough to reach the apex. Most of the boys could do it., but only the more adventure-some girls ever succeeded, at least in my group of play-mates. We kids crossed through the bridge to go to "The Drift" to swim and to explore for black walnuts and wild plums that grew in "certain places" that we knew about across the river.
I wonder how many times Mamie cross through that bridge on her way to various tasks in town."
