St. Mary's Covered Bridge, the county's last

The St. Mary's or Shade Gap covered bridge crosses Shade Creek in Cromwell Township, about four and a half miles south of Orbisonia and just off U.S. Route 522. Huntingdon County owns it as Bridge No. 8. The nomination that put it on the National Register in 1980 calls it the only covered bridge remaining in Huntingdon County, and Nancy S. Shedd's 1991 inventory of the county's historic engineering and industrial sites, published by the National Park Service, says the same. That inventory places the bridge across Route 522 from St. Mary's Catholic Church.

It is a single span about 65 feet long on cut stone abutments, with a tin-covered gable roof. The side walls enclose only the lower part of the trusses; the exterior siding runs vertically, the interior horizontally, and the nomination says the open trusswork above the walls is like that of the Bedford County bridges. The year it was built is not settled. The nomination gives one year and the 1991 inventory, which lists the county commissioners' minute book among its sources, gives another, and the two do not agree. The inventory names E. O. Rogers as the contractor and puts the cost at $540.

The nomination's case rests on two things: that the bridge is the county's last, and that its truss is rare. William Howe of Massachusetts patented the Howe truss in 1840. It used iron rods instead of wooden posts as the tension members, which the nomination says eliminated one heavy timber. Howe sold territorial rights to build on his design, and his brother-in-law Daniel Stone held the rights for Pennsylvania. In 1848 Stone began the railroad bridge over the Susquehanna at Rockville, which was in use until 1876; he died in 1863. The nomination says the Howe truss was more commonly used for railroad bridges and appears never to have been a popular system for covered bridges, which is why it counts the four survivors in Pennsylvania as very unusual: McConnell's Mill in Lawrence County, dated 1874, Kintersburg and Thomas Ford in Indiana County, dated 1877 and 1879, and St. Mary's.

Susan M. Zacher of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission prepared the form, and the bridge was entered in the National Register on March 20, 1980, for engineering and transportation at the local level. In 1982 four steel I-beams replaced the wooden stringers under the deck; the inventory says the planking of the side walls hides them completely.

Checked 2026-09-05 · National Register of Historic Places nomination, read in full

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