N.E. Ohio man makes own covered bridge near home

CHARDON, Ohio (AP) — For more than 20 years, Don Prusha gathered the tall, straight maples that blew down on his 10 acres just outside Chardon.

He collected them as a boy would Lincoln Logs, trucking them a few at a time to the sawmill and storing the boards in the garage and the basement of his cedar-shingled house, which he constructed himself along with two barns and a workshop.

At last, the retired art and industrial-arts teacher had enough lumber.

He would build the bridge.

“I needed another project,” said Prusha, as though that completely explains the old-fashioned covered bridge he is building practically unassisted across a shallow ravine on his secluded property.

The span historically meant for horse and wagon isn’t entirely necessary. It only links a short turnaround to the gravel drive that stretches a quarter-mile from his house to a country road.

The bridge is so far back in the woods that passing drivers can’t appreciate it.

But that’s OK with its builder. Prusha doesn’t want recognition. He is a self-made man who enjoys making things for himself by himself — even a 35-foot-long, 16-foot-high covered bridge, which he researched by examining other bridges and reading books. His wife is the one who called the newspaper.

He’s just glad that he has met his own timetable, having resolved to finish before he became too old to hoist timber beams, tighten steel cable, wrestle trusses into place and teeter on a ladder’s topmost rungs.

“I wanted to see if a 70-year-old guy could do this, and I did,” said Prusha, who thinks that this summer he’ll finish what he started when he was 67. He wrote his name and date — 2006 — in a freshly poured concrete footer, the only work that he hired out.

In the next few months, he’ll side the bridge with yellow poplar gathered from surrounding woods to cover an intricate frame of wooden arches. He has no choice but to hide his handiwork. Severe Geauga County winters would be unkind to the pretty maple pinnings. “But maple is what we grow here. We use what we have,” said Prusha, who built his two-story fireplace of old barn foundation, hewed cherry ceiling beams, fashioned a flat iron into a front-door knob and rigged a squirrel-proof birdfeeder from a plastic pitcher, among many other pioneerlike tasks.

“I had to go out to the woods to find a curved tree,” he said about the arches, his humor as dry as seasoned lumber. (What he really did was glue and clamp thin boards together, patiently coaxing them to bend into arches that can support 10,000 pounds. The painstaking gluing-clamping process took four weeks.)

That her husband built a bridge in their side yard is no surprise to Anne, Prusha’s wife of 42 years. “I have great confidence in Donald. When he says he’ll do something, he does it.

“His perseverance in large projects is admirable.”

“Or abnormal,” he jokes.

But why build a covered bridge?

Prusha gives the simplest answer: He just wanted to.

“I enjoy structures that are straightforward and unpretentious.” Such as antique barns and bridges made with 5-inch nails and salvaged wood without benefit of steel supports.

He knew he’d someday build the bridge when he bought his secluded wooded property 39 years ago. It just took a while for him to get around to it a dozen years after retiring from Beachwood Middle School. He began by making a 3-foot wooden model he keeps in his workshop.

“You just start in, and when you run into problems you just figure it out,” Prusha said, just as he does with the 1952 Ford tractor he keeps running and the 1923 Chevy delivery truck and 1967 Corvair he’s restoring.

The biggest challenge was figuring out how to build a bridge without calling someone for help, he said. (Not wanting to crawl on the steeply pitched roof, he shingled while standing on a ladder on the bridge’s floor. He finished it by reaching through a narrow opening across the roof’s top, working section by section, pounding nails with a hammer he lengthened by attaching a stick to it.)

Now that the bridge is almost done, Prusha is looking for his next project — maybe something simple, like fixing up his 1951 MG sports car, building two end tables and a coffee table and installing woodwork and cabinets that he has made. “I need a break.”

But he’s satisfied with his covered bridge. It goes along with his philosophy of independence: When he wants something, “the first thing I ask is, ‘Can I make it.’” Anne is happy, too, with her husband’s wooden tribute to the old ways. “I think everyone should follow his dream.”