Published Saturday, May 23, 2009

Footbridge will link Coweta, Carroll over river

The Times-Herald

A reproduction of an original bridge over the Chattahoochee River between Coweta and Carroll counties will be constructed as a footbridge as part of an ongoing surge of tourism infrastructure projects undertaken by Carroll County.

"The old bridge was on the old Carrollton Road," said Doug Mabry, a Carroll County historian and researcher, when he spoke to the Common Threads Quilting Club in Newnan last week.

"There's going to be a 500-acre park where the covered bridge used to be," he said. "The project is directly across the river from Coweta County."

The original crossing on the county line near Whitesburg was east of the current Highway 16 bridge and crossing. On the Coweta side, the old road dead-ends into a private farm.

"But we are going to be looking at rebuilding the bridge that originally connected Carroll and Coweta counties," said Mabry.

The bridge -- called Moore's Bridge -- was historically important because it was built by Horace King in 1858. King was an African-American architect and engineer who built covered bridges over every large river in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi -- using his skills to transcend the limits of slavery. He and his family lived for years on the Chattahoochee River, on the Carroll County side of the line, near Whitesburg. They farmed land on the Coweta side of the river.

The bridge was a casualty of the Civil War, as Union troops burned it in July 1864.

"There's an irony there, that this was an African-American entrepreneur of the first magnitude, and the Yankees burned down his bridge," said Mabry. "There's something wrong with that picture."

Carroll County teamed up with the Trust for Public Land to conserve 485 acres along 1.4 miles of the Chattahoochee River. The new park will be called Moore's Bridge Park. Mabry envisions the new park as part of what may eventually be an uninterrupted trail system along the river, through McIntosh Reserve on the Carroll side and on into the new Chattahoochee Bend State Park on the Coweta side.

The Trust for Public Land sold the Moore's Bridge Park land to Carroll County for $4.7 million. The historic James Moore house is also located on the property.

"This area was one of the most important unprotected heritage areas remaining in the Southeast, and it could play a significant role in the county's evolving heritage tourism initiative," Carroll County Commission Chairman Bill Chappell recently told Georgia Trend magazine.

The original Moore's Bridge was described by Maj. Gen. George Stoneman in 1864 as "a covered structure, very well built, 480 feet long, on two main spans."

By the mid-1850s, King had constructed six large bridges over the Chattahoochee at five different sites, according to John S. Lupold and Thomas L. French, who wrote a book about King called "Bridging Deep South Rivers."

"In 1855 or 1856 King first met James D. Moore, who together with King and Charles Mabry of Franklin formed a partnership known as the Arizona Bridge Company, which built Moore's Bridge across the Chattahoochee on the road from Newnan to Carrollton," Lupold and Thomas state in the book.

The bridge "played a central role" in King's life, they wrote, because King was made a one-third stockholder in the bridge company.

"King protected that asset by moving his family to Moore's bridge, where they collected the tolls," they wrote. The King family lived in a small house next to the west end of the bridge, and the Moore house still stands on a hill just above.

"Horace's family also farmed twenty-five acres of H.J. Garrison's land on the eastern side of the Chattahoochee River in Coweta County," Lupold and French said.

King recounted that in 1864 he "read an account in the paper that the Union army had burned my bridge and as my family lived right at it, I got permission to come back to look after them, and when I got home the Union troops had been gone about two days and all (my food and other possessions) gone and my family was in distress."

Historian David Evans, who has Coweta connections, described the fate of the bridge:

"Braving a hail of bullets," a lieutenant from the First Kentucky Calvary "dashed toward the bridge with a flaming torch and thrust it into the dry pine knots and straw the Rebels had stuffed into" the latticework of the bridge. He "ran the gauntlet again and rejoined his comrades just as the smoke began billowing from the cavernous mouth of the span. Flames burst through the roof. Timbers cracked and groaned, and after a few minutes the bridge slid off its piling and plunged into the river."