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Reviews
| Montana's Historic Highway Bridges, 1860–1956. By Jon Axline. Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2005. xiv+173 pp., illus., diags., notes, glossary, bibl., index. $22 pb (ISBN 0-9721522-6-1); $39.95 hb (ISBN 0-9721522-5-3).
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Jon Axline has largely succeeded in writing a general history of Montana's highway bridges. It encompasses a compilation of the histories of individual bridges, analyses of the changing materials and designs used by engineers and bridge builders, and discussions of the changing role of government funding in bridge construction.
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The basic organization is chronological, divided by changing sources of bridge funding. A brief introduction outlines the challenge of preserving historic bridges faced by highway officials, communities, and preservationists. Chapter one examines bridge building through the 1880s, when Montana was emerging from frontier status. The next chapter, "The Golden Age of Bridge Building in Montana," looks at the explosion in construction from roughly 1890 to the coming of the Montana Highway Department in 1915. Chapter three focuses on the highway department's influence on the state's bridges from 1915 through 1929. The impact of federal funding is the organizing theme for chapter four, which considers the era of the Great Depression and World War II. The final chapter, "From World War II to the Interstates," carries the narrative to 1956.
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Most of the book is a compilation of individual bridge histories, strung together chronologically. Axline includes nine sidebars, ranging in length from one to three pages. These cover unique or monumental bridges, truss types, bridge types, and key individuals. They are usually clear and helpful. The book has nearly 80 photographs, mostly of bridges. The acknowledgment section promises lots of Jet Lowe photographs, but there are only three. The book needs a state map showing major features like rivers, cities, and highways.
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Axline could have placed the individual bridge stories and other tales into wider contexts. The book is mostly about trees, with little forest. Axline reveals in his first chapter that most bridges erected in Montana before the 1890s were built by private companies and operated as toll bridges. Was this pattern typical of western frontier states or unique to Montana? Were the efforts of the Montana Highway Department to control local bridge designs and develop standard bridges typical of state highway departments of that era? Despite these flaws, the book is the most comprehensive study to date of Montana's highway bridge history.
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