Horace King

Over the Big Red Oak Creek in rural Meriwether County, Georgia, stands to this day the oldest wooden covered bridge in the state, built by one of America’s most extraordinary nineteenth-century bridge engineers—Horace King. Born in bondage in South Carolina in the early 1800s, King steadily and stunningly rose above his humble beginnings and the barriers of slavery to become the most respected bridge builder in west Georgia, Alabama, and northeast Mississippi in the mid-to-late 1800s. He constructed noteworthy bridge structures over most major rivers in the area, from the Oconee in Georgia to the Tombigbee in Mississippi, to the Chattahoochee in central Georgia and Alabama.

Even though Big Red Oak Creek Bridge is the only survivor of King’s one-hundred-plus bridges, it is an enduring tribute to the master builder’s achievements and his skillful workmanship. At 391 feet, including its approaches, Big Red is the longest existing covered bridge in the state of Georgia. Its vertical load-carrying structural system, “Town” lattice trusses, consist of heavy timber planks crisscrossing at forty-five to sixty-degree angles, fastened at their intersections with more than 2,500 wooden pegs.

So celebrated was (and is) King that town streets in the Chattahoochee Valley have been named in his honor and monuments have been erected to him. In 1989, one-hundred-plus years after his passing, King was paid one of his highest tributes as a bridge engineer. He was inducted into the State of Alabama’s Engineering Hall of Fame, a member of its first class. Founded in 1987 by proclamation of the governor, the Engineering Hall honors outstanding individuals “whose accomplishments and contributions have advanced engineering—and enhanced the economic, cultural and political future of the State of Alabama and the nation.”

Born on September 8, 1807, in the Cheraw District of South Carolina, Horace was the son of Edmund and Susan King, both nonwhites. Edmund was a mulatto, having a mixture of Negro and European heritage, while Susan had Catawba Indian and Negro ancestry. From those roots it would take King half of his lifetime to become a free man.

Young Horace learned to read and write early, something not encouraged or even condoned among slaves in the South in the early 1800s. Those skills, along with diligence and hard work, greatly contributed to his rapid evolution into a highly skilled craftsman—a carpenter and mechanic—while still in his late teens. Over his life, King so came to believe in the power of education that he became famous for the catchphrase “Ignorance breeds poverty.”

In 1820, a Connecticut master carpenter and bridge engineer Ithiel Town patented a lattice-type wood truss bridge and subsequently built several wooden covered bridges based on his design throughout the East. One of those was a historic bridge built in 1827 over the Pee Dee River in the Cheraw District of South Carolina, near King’s home. Whether the twenty-year-old King—an accomplished and known carpenter in the area by then, and the ideal type of craftsman needed for constructing such structures—actually worked on the bridge or not, it’s likely that he was, at the very least, a keen observer of such a major undertaking in his area. Anything he learned in his youth—hands-on or by observation—about how Town designed and constructed bridges would prove to be valuable skills and knowledge that would ultimately shape the direction his life would take.

When King turned twenty-two in 1829, something else happened that dramatically changed his life’s course. His elderly owner died, and King and his mother suddenly became the property of Jennings Dunlap, a South Carolina slave trader, who in turn sold both Horace and Susan to John Godwin, a local building contractor. Godwin, a student of Town’s clever bridge designs and construction details, recognized young King’s building talents, believing he would be a great asset should Godwin ever follow up on his dream of getting into the bridge-building business in a major way.

Shortly after acquiring King and his mother, Godwin did, in fact, start making serious plans to move southwest, into what was considered wilderness area, to seek his fortune as a builder. The roads of the Deep South in those days were rugged and rough, and travelers depended on fords or ferries to navigate rivers, streams, and gorges. Since very few bridges existed in these frontier areas, the opportunities for ambitious builders like Godwin were limitless. Such men could expect to make considerable money constructing bridges and the other buildings nascent border towns required.

In March of 1832, the new town of Columbus, Georgia, accepted Godwin’s bid to build a bridge across the Chattahoochee—the river separating southern Alabama and Georgia—and Godwin, with King in his entourage, moved to Columbus. With King in charge of jobsite supervision and construction detailing, the pair completed Columbus’s City Bridge in short order and, in October of 1833, moved to the Alabama side of the river to Girard (later called Phenix City). There, they quickly became involved in more than a few construction projects, among them building houses. First came Godwin’s home, then King’s, followed by many speculative homes. Early in the community’s existence, nearly every house in Girard had been built by Godwin and King.

Once the two started erecting bridges and other structures together, first as master and worker, then as business partners, their relationship developed into a close and affable friendship that would transcend the typical slave-owner traditions present in the South in the 1800s.

As the pair’s design and construction projects grew in size and complexity, they strived to get as educated as possible about the intricacies of the building trade, reading everything they could get their hands on about the subject. Rumor even has it that Godwin sent King north to Oberlin College in Ohio to refine his skills and training. Oberlin, Ohio, in the early-to-mid 1800s, was an integrated community far ahead of its time, especially with regard to its antislavery views. Its college was “the only place in the country where a black man could get a low-cost education and the same time be respected as a man.”

After King finished what education he was after at Oberlin, says the rumor, he returned to Alabama better prepared to take design and construct more and bigger bridges. Armed with King’s expanded building and engineering skills, Godwin and King felt fully capable of taking on any bridge project that came their way, to the point that they would often guarantee their bridges for five years. If a bridge of theirs sagged or was damaged by a normal flood within that time, they repaired or replaced it without charge. This practice, along with the continuing superb performance of City Bridge (their first), quickly firmed up their reputation as one of the top and most sought-after bridge-building teams in the South.

After City Bridge, one of the pair’s other great early bridges was the over eight-hundred-foot-long Eufaula Bridge, south of Columbus. At seventy feet above water, much higher than most bridges of the time, it was an impressive and awesome structural sight to behold. And travelers-over and passersby didn’t easily forget it.

King became a master at prefabrication, building large sections of his bridges next to (or near) the spot of crossing, then hoisting them into position onto already constructed stone abutment and beam-pier supports. It reduced the amount of temporary scaffolding and construction time he needed, and sped up his delivery time, much to the satisfaction of his customers. When the bridge superstructure was finished and whatever amount of scaffolding he used was torn away, King himself would load-test the bridges by riding across them on a fully loaded, horse-pulled wagon.

After several early King and Godwin successes, Godwin began leaving most of their bridge building work up to King to supervise and complete. It freed up Godwin to spend more of his time and energy constructing commercial buildings and houses, his first love. He also started several different businesses and invested heavily in the Girard-Mobil Railroad—more money than he could really afford, which would be a major factor in his later downfall.

In 1839, King and Godwin won the contract to build a bridge across the Chattahoochee at West Point, Georgia. While there working on the project, the thirty-two-year-old King met his future wife—Francis Gould Thomas. She was eighteen years his junior, beautiful, and though of Indian, Negro, and white ancestry, a free woman—any children they would have would also be free (according to the laws of many Southern states at the time). The couple would have five children—sons Washington, Marshall, John, and George, and daughter Annie Elizabeth. All five would, in due time, join their father in the building industry. Although King remained clean-shaven his whole life, all four of his sons would sport dapper beards and moustaches in adulthood.

Horace and Francis’s marriage lasted twenty-five years, until Francis’s untimely death in 1864 at the young age of thirty-eight. By then King had been a free man for eighteen years, having earned his freedom in 1846 when he was thirty-nine. In addition to that satisfaction, Francis had the pleasure of seeing her all children properly educated and pointed toward promising lives—and close to their father.

By the mid-1800s, King’s talents and hands-on skills far exceeded Godwin’s when it came to the design and building of complex covered bridges. And area business leaders and powers-that-be began contracting directly with King, with no objection from Godwin. Robert Jemison, a wealthy Tuscaloosa planter, politician, and entrepreneur, for one, began hiring King on a regular basis to manage his bridge-building projects in west Alabama and eastern Mississippi. These projects proved to be quite profitable for King, and his association with Jemison, like that with Godwin, developed into a trusting and warm personal relationship that endured both of their lifetimes.

In 1854, Jemison wrote to one of his business associates, saying, “I regard Horace as the best practicing bridge builder in the South.” The endorsement and patronage of the powerful Jemison proved to be a great boon to King’s emerging stature as a respected engineer and businessman. Lucrative building jobs and business opportunities increasingly began coming his way. His finances steadily improved, as did his ability to be an investor in certain projects. One of the first such ventures was Moore’s Bridge over the Chattahoochee, between Newman and Carrollton, in the mid-1850s, where King ended up accepting stock in the enterprise as payment for building the bridge. It proved to be a profitable decision.

Talk of a civil war and the South’s secession from the Union were already much in the air in 1859 when King’s longtime cohort Godwin died. By then, Godwin’s large debts and piles of virtually worthless railroad stocks had considerably reduced his once large estate to a pittance. King, however, remained loyal to him to the end and beyond, continuing to assist Godwin’s sons in running Godwin’s family businesses and sawmills. Once the Civil War began in 1861, and while Godwin’s sons were called into it as soldiers, King more or less ran the Godwin operations in their absence.

Because Godwin’s fortunes were suffering, and money tight, when he was buried, King took it upon himself to install a proper headstone for Godwin—a large marble monument with the inscription: “This stone is placed here by Horace King, in lasting remembrance of the love and gratitude he felt for his lost friend and former master.” Years later, King’s magnanimous gesture would be considered so rare that the Godwin monument would earn a spot on Ripley’s Believe It or Not! list of incredible curiosities.

When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in late 1860, all talk and innuendos by southerners about going to war and breaking from the Union stopped. Talking was over and it was time for action. By early 1861, the South’s forces were well armed and making aggressive moves. In April, they stormed and took Fort Sumter, sending the North reeling. America’s war between the states was fully underway!

The Civil War brought an economic boom to Columbus, and King and other local contractors capitalized on the situation. They were frequently pressed into service, often against their will, to work for the Confederacy building fortifications and other defense-related projects. The governor of Alabama singled out King in 1863, sending a telegram to J. F. Bozeman, the wartime mayor of Columbus, specifically demanding that King supply large timbers, place defensive obstructions in southern Alabama rivers, and work on projects crucial to the South. The Confederate navy, additionally, hired King to build a rolling mill for producing iron plates for its ironclad warships.

As the deadly war was ending in 1865, the war-torn American Union suffered one final momentous blow—the April shooting and killing of its president, the Great Emancipator. Lincoln, who was born in 1809, two years after and poor like King, was poised to spend most of his second term unifying and rebuilding. Without his leadership, the country would find the immense task of moving forward strained, indeed. The shattered nation was racked with a wide range of sentiments and emotions—joy and sorrow, relief and resentment, and hope and despair. In the end, the spirit of individual Americans would be up to the task of picking up the pieces, putting them together, and moving on. At the forefront in rebuilding the country as quickly as possible were those skilled at engineering and construction, among them daring and ambitious men like Horace King.

Because of his past record of building successful projects and the readiness of his five mature children, King was especially well positioned to take advantage of the many postwar rebuilding opportunities that were surfacing in and around Columbus. His enterprising and hardworking children were just the kind of people he could rely on and needed for all the construction projects he had his sights on. So, he formed the King Brothers Bridge Company. It would rapidly and successfully complete several major postwar projects, including replacing Columbus’s City Bridge, which was burned as a strategic military maneuver during the war—the same bridge, which over thirty years earlier, launched King and Godwin on their successful construction career together.

Within a few years after the Civil War, the King Brothers Bridge Company was off and running, constructing new facilities rather than simply repairing and replacing those destroyed in the war. Over its existence, the King Company would design and build not only bridges, but many public and commercial buildings, schools, warehouses, factories, and houses from Georgia through Alabama to Mississippi.

In 1868, King, a Republican, was elected as a state congressman to the Alabama House of Representatives. He served for two terms, from 1868 until 1872. His other stints at public service included being a magistrate in Russell County and registrar in the City of Girard, helping compile the 1870 census for Russell County.

After five years of being a widower, the sixty-two-year-old King decided to remarry in 1869. His second wife, Sarah Jane McManus, was, like his first wife, much younger than him. They would have no children.

In 1872, King and his family moved from the Columbus/Girard area to LaGrange, Georgia, where he and his company continued to do well designing and constructing bridges, stores, houses, and college buildings. Among the notable nonbridge projects he and his sons constructed were the chapel for the Southern female college LaGrange Academy (the first black college in the area), and the parsonage for the Warren Methodist Church.

Ten years after moving to LaGrange, the aging but prosperous King gradually began slowing down and letting his children take charge the construction business. He spent more and more time relaxing. One of his great passions became raising and riding fine horses. When seen in public, the elderly master bridge builder was always dressed up, frequently wearing velvet-lapel suits. Even in his last days, he stood ramrod straight and moved with grace—a strong, silent man satisfied with what he had accomplished.

When Horace King died on May 28, 1885, at age seventy-eight, he was still handsome, proud, and noble looking. When his casket passed though LaGrange, its streets were lined with hundreds of people paying their respect. His obituary in the LaGrange Reporter praised his many great accomplishments as a builder and engineer, and captured his essence, saying, “He had risen to prominence by force of genius and character.”

The King mansion in LaGrange still remains, now a bed and breakfast establishment. It stands, along with Big Red Oak Bridge, as a quiet remainder of the self-made engineer who became an icon of his times.