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      The co-author’s father, Max Miller, began photographing bridges in 1953 and involved his entire family on this 1960 vacation in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. (Max T. Miller, 1960)

      So who is qualified to write such a book? Since covered bridges have no consistent place in academia, we cannot expect any particular group of scholars to step up to the plate. It is also true that today there is a dedicated coterie of covered bridge “enthusiasts,” people who spend goodly amounts of time and money “chasing” covered bridges, as Paul Parrott put it in the title of his 2005 Chasing Covered Bridges and How to Find Them. While some enthusiasts do contribute articles to publications, no one has been inclined to take on the daunting task of making sense of covered bridge history and technology on a North American scale. Indeed, it could be asked if anyone is capable of taking on such a challenge. While constantly aware that we “do not know everything,” we also understand that “if not us, then who?”

      Primary author, Terry E. Miller, is a retired professor of Ethno-musicology, a field devoted to the study of music around the world, at Kent State University in Ohio. His work over the past forty plus years has focused on the music of Mainland Southeast Asia, primarily Thailand and Laos, while having a second major interest in orally transmitted psalm and hymn singing spanning the British Isles, North America, and the English-speaking West Indies, and a third interest in Chinese music. It is reasonable to ask, how is an ethnomusicologist qualified to write on covered bridges?

      Miller was born and raised in Dover, Ohio, a town of about 10,000 in east-central Ohio. His interest in covered bridges developed because his late father, Max T. Miller (1916–2009), purchased a Leica M-2 camera in 1951 and decided to shoot pictures of a few of the known covered bridges in nearby counties, especially Harrison and Coshocton. His home county, Tuscarawas, had lost its last covered bridge by 1947, long before anyone in the Miller family was aware of such structures. At age eight, the author began appearing in his father’s photographs, though having little appreciation of the significance of covered bridges.

      One experience, however, did leave an indelible impression: walking through the 400-foot Conesville Bridge spanning the Muskingum River south of Coshocton, whose overwhelming width and height dwarfed the young boy. He also vividly recalls meeting the by-then long retired “Mad Marshall” Jacobs, once a notorious steeplejack and “flag pole sitter.”

      In 1956, Miller’s father began systematically photographing the covered bridges of Ohio, and in 1959 expanded into Pennsylvania. By 1962, however, coinciding with the younger Miller’s acquisition of a driver’s license, his father had lost interest, leaving the zeal for covered bridges to his son. Since then, Miller has continued visiting, measuring, and researching nearly 1,000 covered bridges, most in the United States, but including four in Switzerland, around fifty in Canada, and over forty in the People’s Republic of China. During his years of college and graduate study (1963–75), including two years in the military (1968–70), covered bridge research sometimes had to wait, but in 1966 he managed to draft his first book, The Covered Bridges of Tuscarawas County, Ohio, which was self-published in 1975 but had been researched in the early 1960s. He also escaped from his studies at the College of Wooster (Ohio) during 1966–7 to research the covered bridges of Coshocton County, which was published in 2009 as The Covered Bridges of Coshocton County, Ohio: A History. Spanning this time, he also published numerous short articles in several covered bridge magazines, built a number of balsa wood scale models of particular bridges, and around 1960 won a “superior” in a state-wide science

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