You have probably heard of lydia and moses shepherd. He allegedly used his influence with senator clay to have the bridge built close to their home. It is still in heavy use. It is covered in concrete so you cannot see the original stonework unfortunately. But it still is the oldest bridge in West Virginia still in continuous use. The third and most famous bridge is our beloved wheeling suspension bridge which is just up main street on 10th street. This particular type is one of the oldest if not the oldest photographs of wheeling. It is taken from above the bridge near 10th street. You can see the bridge here. During the 1852 flood. So the entire island and wheeling was plagued by floods annually during this period. This is a very famous photograph and you can see it in numerous books and as i said possibly the oldest photograph of wheeling. The suspension bridge there was a competition to design it featuring the man who eventually brook the Brooklyn Bridge and charles junior a designer who prevail and the bridge was opened in 1849. During its early history, the city of pittsburgh didnt like the bridge because they claimed it interfered for river traffic because it was too low. They filled suit and did prevail. The bridge was badly damaged in a storm and restored and while it was damaged the steamboats from pittsburgh would lower their stacks and blow whistles. It was unpopular in pittsburgh. But we prevailed. The bridge is still there. It was restore and a beautiful piece of work. It was 1,010 feet span. As i said it was cuttingedge for its time. It is still a remarkable structure. To transition to our rare books collection this particular book contains one of charles original designs for the suspension bridge. It was more of a, lets say, more decorative than fancy when it was initially conceived late in the 1840s. And the first city directory is here. It is very important to researchers and historians to learn where businesses were located and where some of the important families lived and what their occupations were. This is from 1839. A very few of these exist. Alphabetically arranged. Names of streets and allies and business places and family residents. We have a whole election of city directories heavily used by researchers. A historian would use a city directory to find where a business was located and how long it existed by checking each year. And also to learn where someone, a person who is listed in here, where their primary place of business was and where they work and their profession. Many contain the structure of the town where businesses are located. You can determine, you know where the commercial section was, where the industrial section was and that sort of thing. This is to show you how beautiful the printing was. This is 1876 from the same collection of the wheeling intelligence or wheeling intelligence daily as it was called thinen. This is a particularly pristine copy. We have them on film but it was nice to see how they are laid out. Because it was a rough and ready city i think a lot of writers were drawn here and i think that is why a lot of printers came here. I think preserving our history in terms of Historic Buildings and structures and infrastructure and books and literature and photograph is essential. This is our story. No second hp hand account can tell you adequately how things were. You can go into a historic structure and feel what it was like to be in that building 200 years ago. Heres a look at up up coming book fairs and festivals. Booktv continues with allen west. He talks about the importance of preserving the core values he was