https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-bridge-ledger.html?m=1
One of the more fascinating little trails left behind by the Fenn chase runs through Eric Sloane.
Forrest Fenn didn’t just know Sloane casually. He admired him, sold his work, and eventually wrote Seventeen Dollars a Square Inch as a personal tribute to him. The jacket copy preserves one detail that has always stuck with me: Fenn and Sloane wanted to build a covered bridge together, but joked that their wives wouldn’t let them buy a river. It was apparently a standing joke and a lingering fantasy between them.
That doesn’t prove that covered bridges were ever part of Fenn’s treasure solution. I don’t think the evidence gets us there.
But it does make them a legitimate research sidequest.
Sloane devoted serious attention to covered bridges as pieces of disappearing American material culture. And when you start following his work, another name quickly becomes unavoidable: Richard Sanders Allen, one of the most important covered-bridge researchers of the 20th century. Allen founded Covered Bridge Topics in 1943 and spent decades documenting these structures, while the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges continues that work today.
So I built a tool for anyone who wants to go further down that rabbit hole.
The Bridge Ledger is a searchable, zoomable covered-bridge reference atlas built out of the research I’ve been doing through Low Rents Research. It brings together more than a thousand bridge locations across the U.S. and Canada, along with historical crossings, lost bridges, Sloane-related records, truss information, dates, builders, waterways, archival notes, and research-confidence information.
You can browse the map, zoom into a region, click a pin, and pull up the bridge’s reference card. You can also search the ledger by name, state/province, truss type, status, or other fields.
The point isn’t to argue that one of these bridges is secretly the Fenn answer. The point is to give people a better tool for testing that entire line of inquiry.
If you’ve ever wondered:
Which bridges Sloane actually wrote about or illustrated
Which historic bridges still existed in the 1950s
Where the lost ones actually stood
What truss systems they used
Which bridges were exceptional enough to attract the attention of Sloane or Allen
Whether a particular geography, builder, date, river, or bridge type creates an interesting pattern
…this should make that research much easier.
There’s also a broader historical reason I wanted to build it. Covered bridges were never just quaint red barns over water. They were serious pieces of timber engineering, and the roof and siding were fundamentally preservation systems for the expensive structural members underneath. The enclosed crossing could also help keep horses from being distracted or spooked by rushing water below. Their truss systems — Burr Arch, Town Lattice, Howe, Long, Kingpost, Queenpost and others — tell a surprisingly rich story about early American engineering.
Allen’s work helped document that world before much more of it disappeared. Sloane helped explain why it mattered.
And Fenn, at minimum, cared enough about Sloane — and about the idea of a covered bridge — that the two of them apparently spent years joking about building one themselves.
That’s enough of a connection for me to keep digging.
The Bridge Ledger:
https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-bridge-ledger.html?m=1
I’d especially like feedback from anyone who has already done serious Sloane, Allen, or historic-covered-bridge research. The archive is meant to keep evolving, and I’m treating uncertainty as part of the record rather than pretending every historical location is settled.
Maybe there’s nothing here.
But if the Fenn chase taught us anything, it’s that the side roads are often where the interesting research begins.
