The History of the Trestle Bridge

Once back in Chattanooga the research on the Trestle Bridge began.  In 1991, there was an "Agent of change: the railroad in West Virginia" exhibition at the Huntington Museum of Art from July 21- Nov. 10, 1991, which was listed in both the Smithsonian and Oberlin College Library. Through LinkedIn that led to the curator was Ms. Beth Hager who is now the (recently retired) Director of the State Museum of Pennsylvania. Ms. Hager and her father (with the camera) are shown in the third image below. Writing Beth Hager, the then Huntington Museum Curator looking for pictures and Ms. Hager replied to an email request for information.

"Hi! That’s so fascinating! How in the world did you hear about our trestle after almost 30 years?!

It was really cool - enables us to bridge over a major hallway between the two large rooms of the exhibition. It was G-scale. It was totally designed and fabricated by volunteers from the local model railroad association." Ms. Hager happily provided the following photographs from the opening reception in July 1991.

Ms. Hager wrote that she has been digitizing VHS tapes "and luckily I did find the orientation piece that local Huntington, WV NBC affiliate WSAZ-TV produced with me on the exhibition in the summer of 1991. Being almost 30 years old the tape is a bit degenerated but is still viewable, And, the good news is that there is indeed a mention with video (!) of the great volunteers who constructed and installed the trestle, P.M. Randall and Mike Kenos. The orientation video played in a part of the gallery on a loop."  We will work on getting the rights to add that video to this site.