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Excerpt from North Carolina's Metal Truss Bridges: An Inventory and Evaluation The remaining North Carolina truss bridges represent the higher order of truss bridge development. They are the result of the later period of truss bridge building that applied physical principles to the configurations and quality control to the materials. The early design process of trusses was by trial and error and the observation of failures. It was the need to produce predictable reactions within the bridge members that led to the logical analysis of trusses. The nation itself was growing only as fast as its railroads, and their primary requirement was a means of spanning rivers and gorges. The truss bridges in North Carolina today are recognized as being the remains of a larger group of bridges that were built between 1830 and 1930. Of the hundreds of wood truss bridges that were built in the nineteenth century, and even until the early twentieth century, only three remain. These early trusses suffered more from lack of attention than do the trusses of the latter part of the twentieth century. Being maintained on the local level, these bridges were often neglected in the area of repair and were mostly replaced with metal trusses. The present site of the 160' Camelback of Chatham #155 was once a two - span wooden truss bridge. The earliest known reference to this bridge is 1833. The present bridge is supported on its north end by a fieldstone pier that probably dates to the earlier bridge. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do,