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“The Bridges of Madison County,” the novel by Robert James Waller and movie with Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep, came to mind as we drove through central Vermont and the Mad River Valley last month.
My wife and I were on a quest to find as many covered bridges as possible, and there were more than a dozen in the area. Some were the centerpieces of town, like the Great Eddy Bridge, originally built in 1833 in Waitsfield; others like the Cilley Bridge over the White River in Tunbridge, built in 1883, required several drive-bys and a cautious approach down narrow, semipaved side roads.
A handful of Vermont’s covered bridges, some of the older and more magnificent ones, were rebuilt after damage from Hurricane Irene in 2011. The New York Times reported that the Taftsville Bridge, built in 1836, and the Upper Cox Brook Bridge in Northfield, built in 1872, both listed on the National Register of Historic Places, were among the covered bridges requiring repairs in the aftermath of the hurricane. We drove through both.
Among the more charming covered bridges was Middle Bridge in Woodstock, a prototypical small New England village with colonial-style architecture and a triangular green in the village center. The bridge, with a walkway for pedestrians, smelled of cedar and was held together by round wooden pegs. It was a newer bridge, put up in 1969 to replace a condemned iron-ore structure. Not to be mistaken for the renowned concert spot in New York, Woodstock was named after the railroad that ran through the village.
Locals used covered bridges as part of regular routes to cross streams and canals in quiet, picturesque hamlets of central Vermont. There were single-lane bridges; we were advised that the rule for driving single-lane bridges was alternating vehicles. There were two-lane bridges and some had paths for bicycles and pedestrians.
In Waitsfield, there were bridge divers. On a hot summer afternoon, young boys and girls lined up to perform cannonballs and back flips from the Great Eddy Bridge into the Mad River below.
The weathered, single-lane Warren Bridge, built in 1880 and repaired in 2001 in the town of Warren, made you wonder if it had passed inspection. The bridge had two-by-six or two-by-eight planks as driving guides. The rhythmic bumble of rubber bouncing on wooden planks echoed through the bridge.
Maui has many bridges. There are the historic bridges to Hana about which a song was written. The state built a beautiful, multimillion dollar bridge over a gulch on the Lahaina bypass, designed to maintain the views without support structures on top.
But there are no covered bridges on Maui to my knowledge.
Covered bridges first appeared in Europe during the Middle Ages but flourished in the U.S. in the 19th century, where they helped encourage the country’s economic development on a growing network of roads, according to the Smithsonian Covered Bridges exhibit website.
The first covered bridge in the country appeared over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia in 1805. By the 1870s, there were more than 10,000 bridges, part of the country’s westward expansion, according to the Smithsonian.
Between 1870 and 1970, 90 percent of the country’s covered bridges were destroyed by arsonists, natural causes and progress in transportation, according to Smithsonian. Today, only about 750 remain, concentrated mostly in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Vermont, Indiana, New Hampshire and Oregon.
“Perhaps no single person did more for the covered bridge in recent times than author Robert James Waller, whose 1992 book ‘The Bridges of Madison County’ stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 150 weeks,” stated the Smithsonian website.
Beyond their uniqueness, the bridges cross time and space. They harken back to a simpler day of horse-drawn buggies and wagons. A vehicle really seems out of time in these bridges.
In fact, over the entrance to the Mill Bridge in Tunbridge, originally built in 1883 and overhauled in 2000, there is a sign that read: “ONE DOLLAR FINE For A Person To Drive A Horse Or Other Beast Faster Than A Walk Or Drive More Than One Loaded Team At The Same Time ON THIS BRIDGE.”
Vermont locals explained that the covered bridges protected horse-drawn wagons from ice and snow build up and offered a sanctuary during a blizzard. Other reports said that the covers helped shield the wooden trusses that hold up the bridge. Those were the practical answers to the question of why they are covered, but one Vermont resident conjectured that the covered bridges were built as romantic getaways, where young couples in love could steal a kiss to the soothing music of the stream below.
There are 114 covered bridges in central Vermont, the highest concentration of bridges in the U.S., according to central-tv.com. A century ago, there were more than 600 covered bridges but the flood of 1927 left only about 200 still up. Half of them since have been lost to fire or development.
Our quest for covered bridges in an afternoon and a morning in late August yielded 20 of them, and we photographed most.
Here are our “Covered Bridges of Central Vermont.”
* Lee Imada can be reached at leeimada@mauinews.com.
* See additional photo gallery of bridges in following article