Bridging Deep South Rivers: The Life and Legend of Horace King.

Bridging Deep South Rivers: The Life and Legend of Horace King. By John S. Lupold and Thomas L. French Jr. (Athens, Ga., and London: Published by the University of Georgia Press in cooperation with the Historic Chattahoochee Commission and the Troup County Historical Society, c. 2004. Pp. xvi, 335. $29.95, ISBN 0-8203-2626-7.)

John S. Lupold and Thomas L. French Jr. have three overarching goals in this book: to write a definitive biography of Horace King, a remarkable African American builder of wooden bridges in the nineteenth-century Deep South; to debunk the myths surrounding King; and to demonstrate the importance of these bridges to the economic vitality of the nineteenth-century South. The authors succeed on the first two points but only indirectly explore the third point.

Horace King was born of tri-racial heritage into slavery in South Carolina in 1807. By the 1820s he learned the art of building covered wooden bridges in the Town-Truss style (named for Ithiel Town, the inventor) and became coequal with his master, John Godwin, as a contractor of bridges in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. In 1846 King's friends in the Alabama state legislature helped Godwin emancipate King, who then engaged in bridge building throughout the rest of the antebellum period. He married a free woman of color and purchased property on the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee River. During the Civil War, he was pressed into service to construct naval vessels for the Confederacy in Columbus, Georgia. Following the war, King served an undistinguished career as a Republican in the Alabama legislature and then moved to LaGrange, Georgia, for the remainder of his life. By the 1880s he experienced financial setbacks but successfully established several of his sons as bridging contractors in his stead. King died in 1885, and obituaries in white newspapers praised this exceptional person of color.

The authors discredit a number of myths surrounding Horace King. Local bridge enthusiasts frequently assume that their extant covered bridges in Georgia and Alabama were built by King since he was the best-known master builder of this genre. Instead Lupold and French repeatedly demonstrate that the bridges in question were built long after King's death and that his sons built some of them. Second, the authors tackle neo-Confederate desires to use King as an example of the benevolence of slavery. Although King erected a monument to his former master after Godwin's death, Lupold and French convincingly argue that this was as much political theater to maintain his own freedom in 1859 as it was a tribute to his departed friend.

Bridging Deep South Rivers: The Life and Legend of Horace King fails to directly argue for the importance of King's bridges to the southern economy. While the authors demonstrate a correlation of increases in the numbers of bridges in the South with the expansion of the southern economy, they do not succeed in demonstrating a causal relationship. However, some of the strengths of the book are its many photographs of covered bridges and its easily understood explanations of the technology of nineteenth-century covered wooden bridges. Ultimately, they never answer questions about the personal relationships of King with his white benefactors, but the failure stems from the nature of the sources rather than the efforts of the authors. Seminars on nineteenth-century race relations will benefit from the questions raised by this book.

MICHAEL J. GAGNON

Clemson University