Born 1902 in Locust Fork, Blount County; died 1987. Built or helped build nearly every covered bridge Blount County ever constructed, including the Swann Bridge, Nectar Bridge, Blount Springs Bridge, and Horton Mill Bridge, before retiring in 1936 to join the Alabama Highway Patrol.
Full story: Zelma Clyde Tidwell, Blount County’s Bridge Builder.
His family line: son of William Barnett “Willie” Tidwell (1874-1948) and Ellen B. “Mamie” Headley Tidwell (1878-1902), who died the year he was born; grandson of Jeremiah “Jerry” Tidwell (1853-1939); great-grandson of Richard Blake Tidwell (1816-1889) and Sarah Jane “Jennie” Branham Tidwell (1819-1913). The senior generations are buried at Tidwell Cemetery.
A probable identification, flagged rather than asserted: the “uncle Forrest Tidwell” who ran the county bridge crew he started under is very likely DeForrest Tidwell (1857-1940), a documented brother of his grandfather Jeremiah - the right family and era, and the only Forrest in it. That would make him Zelma’s great-uncle rather than his uncle, a distinction family memory routinely collapses. Not confirmed against the original source.
His family had married into the Nectar community a generation before he bridged it. He built the Nectar Bridge in 1934, a few miles from Greens Chapel Cemetery at Cleveland - where his grandfather’s second wife Matilda Elizabeth “Lizzie” Green and his great-uncle’s second wife Frances “Fannie” Sanders both came from the two families that fill that cemetery. His second cousin, Elizabeth Mae “Bessie” Tidwell Green (1890-1969), is buried there.
The Tidwell trunk, at Tidwell Cemetery in Cleveland (184 interments, 2.3 miles from Greens Chapel): his great-grandparents Richard Blake Tidwell (1816-1889) and Sarah Jane “Jennie” Branham Tidwell (1819-1913) had eight children, including two sergeants and two reverends - Sgt. Uriah (1838-1906), James Matthew (1840-1867), Sgt. Isaiah (1843-1918), Robert (1848-1921), Rev. Francis (1850-1909), Zelma’s grandfather Jeremiah “Jerry” (1853-1939), DeForrest (1857-1940), and Louvisa Tidwell Yarborough (1860-1951). Richard Blake’s own parents were Robert T. Tidwell Jr. (1770-1845) and Mona Monica Roden Tidwell (1780-1830).
The family married into this site’s own founding families twice over. Rev. Francis Tidwell’s second wife was Mary Jane Murphree (1849-1947), a great-granddaughter of Solomon Murphree via William Bynum Murphree - a direct, documented link between the covered-bridge family and the Murphree patriarch line. Sgt. Uriah’s daughter Eliza Jane Tidwell (1866-1906) married a Murphree in the same generation, and his sister Louvisa married James Monroe Yarborough (1849-1914).