The Small Red Bridge in Winter — Highland Ridge, c. 1978–1985

The iconic photograph of the small red bridge Will Eesley the architect built at his own Highland Ridge Road property, captured in winter with snow on the boards and the wood-and-stone house Will designed visible through the trees behind.

What the photograph records

A wooden footbridge with red-painted railings and red ball-finial posts, spanning a small ravine on the Eesley family property. Snow lies thick on the bridge’s planks, accumulated overnight; no footprints disturb the surface. The bridge curves slightly upward at center as it arches across the ravine. Behind it, through the bare deciduous trees, the wood-and-stone modernist house Will designed for his family is partly visible — the long roof, the wide eaves, the structural posts of the deck side. A small pine tree at right is dressed in fresh snow.

The photograph carries Will’s architectural signature even at the scale of the bridge — a designed object, with the red-painted railings and the red ball-finial posts answering the same wood-and-craft aesthetic he had carried through the house itself.

The eulogy’s bridge

This is the bridge of Chuck’s 2015 eulogy for his father — the one that gets named twice. First as one of the property’s labor sites:

“we did spend a lot of time in the outdoors, especially around the house that my grandfather designed, tending to the orchard my grandfather had planted, cutting firewood, shoveling the driveway, or rebuilding the small, red bridge my grandfather had originally built.”

Three generations of Eesley male labor on this bridge: Will the architect built it; Charlie and Chuck later rebuilt it together. The bridge in this winter photograph is presumably the first iteration — Will’s original — before Charlie and Chuck took it apart and put it back up.

Why this frame is the property’s defining image

The Highland Ridge property has a number of physical features the family memory holds onto — the house Will designed, the orchard, the pond, the long driveway up to the road. But the small red bridge is the single most-named element in Chuck’s eulogy and the most distinctively Will-designed object on the property. The winter-snow frame strips away the orchard, the lawn, the everyday yard, and isolates the bridge as the central object on the property. The picture is roughly the family’s equivalent of the 413 Harmar Street Google Street View on the maternal side — the canonical documentary image of the place.

Source: Eesley family archive, transmitted by Chuck Eesley 2026. Probable photographer: Will Eesley himself.