Nearly every covered bridge Blount County ever built came out of one man’s career. Zelma Clyde Tidwell was born in 1902 in the community of Locust Fork, and after serving in the U.S. Navy, came home and went to work under his uncle Forrest Tidwell, foreman of the county’s bridge construction crew - starting, like everyone did, as a bridge painter.
He took over as foreman around 1930 to 1933, leading a crew of roughly 15 to 20 men, and built in the Town lattice truss design throughout his career. As a crew member under his uncle, he worked the Easley Bridge (1927), Locust Fork Bridge (1927), Dean’s Ferry Bridge (1930), Duck Branch Bridge (1930), Inland Bridge (1930), Blount Springs Bridge (1931), Slab Creek Bridge (1931), and Crooked Shoals Bridge (1931). As foreman himself, he built the Tyre Green Bridge (1933), Swann Bridge (1933), Nectar Bridge (1934), and Horton Mill Bridge (1934-35).
Horton Mill Bridge, built over the Calvert Prong of the Locust Fork five miles north of Oneonta, replaced an 1894 bridge that had served Thurman Horton’s water mill; the new bridge was built by a crew under Talmedge Horton, a descendant of the mill’s namesake, working alongside Tidwell. At 70 feet above the gorge floor, it is the highest covered bridge above a river in the United States, and on December 29, 1970, it became the first covered bridge in the southeastern United States listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Two of Tidwell’s bridges connect directly to West Blount’s own history. The Blount Springs Bridge, built in 1931, is the same bridge already pictured on this site’s own “First Mountain Brook Was in Blount County” - a 1940s photograph captioned “on the road between Blount Springs and Mountain Brook,” the crossing now on County Road 5. And two independent sources confirm that Tidwell’s crew built a “Vaughn Bridge” as part of this same body of work, the covered successor to the crossing B.H. Vaughn built by hand at Smith Ford in 1895. Neither the Blount Springs Bridge nor the Vaughn Bridge survives today - of all the bridges Tidwell built or helped build, only Swann, Horton Mill, and Easley still stand.
Tidwell retired from bridge building in 1936 to join the Alabama Highway Patrol. Blount County never built another covered bridge after he left. He died in 1987.
Source: web research following the Swann Bridge history already documented on this site.
