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    Massachusetts Covered Bridges
    Massachusetts Covered Bridges
    Massachusetts Covered Bridges
    Ebook180 pages1 hour

    Massachusetts Covered Bridges

    By John S. Burk

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    From hidden valleys in the Berkshire Hills to the North Shore, 275 documented highway and railroad covered bridges have been constructed in Massachusetts from the early 19th century onward, a figure that often comes as a surprise to those who traditionally associate these unique structures with northern New England. All but a small handful of these are long gone, lost to modern replacements, fires, wear, and the region's notorious weather, especially the devastating storms of the late 1930s. The bridges came in all shapes and sizes, from diminutive 50-foot spans to multitiered structures of nearly 900 feet that crossed the Merrimack and Connecticut Rivers and were stout enough to support railroads across their roofs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439638743
    Massachusetts Covered Bridges
    Author

    John S. Burk

    John S. Burk has authored guidebooks and articles related to the New England outdoors and worked for 10 years as historical researcher and archivist at Harvard Forest. For Massachusetts Covered Bridges, he traveled to repositories throughout the state, including historical societies, libraries, town halls, and the state transportation offices in Boston. With the invaluable assistance of numerous contributors, he has compiled this collection of images that document many of the lost bridges and also record the changes of the few that remain today.

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      Book preview

      Massachusetts Covered Bridges - John S. Burk

      agency.

      INTRODUCTION

      While gathering images for this project during the summer of 2009, I took a brief detour off the Mohawk Trail Highway in Charlemont and followed Route 8A north through the recently renovated Bissell Bridge, a 60-foot-long covered bridge that spans a tributary of the nearby Deerfield River. A century ago, it was commonplace for travelers throughout Massachusetts to cross a covered bridge, but on this particular day, there was no other place in the state where one could drive along a public highway through one of these unique historic structures.

      Indeed, the Bay State’s handful of remaining historic covered bridges, a small fraction of the number found to the north in neighboring Vermont and New Hampshire, belies the fact that more than 270 such structures have been built across the state’s numerous rivers, streams, and railroad crossings. This total includes multiple bridges built at the same location over time, but does not include those that are presently classified as private modern shelters.

      The Massachusetts bridges existed in all shapes and sizes, from massive structures in the Connecticut and Merrimack Valleys that ranged from 800 to 1,300 feet in length to the diminutive 50-foot Adamsville Bridge in Colrain. The largest bridges featured multiple spans that were supported by broad stone piers in the riverbed. A few sturdy structures at Montague City, Northfield, and Newburyport were even used as combination bridges in which a railroad passed across the top.

      Though information on covered railroad bridges is often scarce, sources indicate that roughly 100, or more than one-third of the state’s overall total covered bridges, were built across the state during the 19th and early 20th centuries, including clusters near manufacturing centers such as Worcester, Athol, Holyoke, and Pittsfield. Many of these distinctive structures, which were built and maintained by private companies and faced the ever-present dangers of fire and heavy loads, had relatively short life spans and were lost during the 19th century. There are no surviving examples of covered railroad bridges in Massachusetts, and only a small handful remains in New England—in New Hampshire and Vermont.

      The only documentation for some of the early town and railroad bridges are solitary appearances in drawings on old maps, vague citations in local histories and town records, and old photographs. In some instances, the year the bridge was built and/or lost and even its exact location are unknown. In towns where multiple covered bridges were built, it can be difficult to distinguish general references to bridges or covered bridges. Further complicating research are instances such as the handful of postcards where towns are mislabeled or where single or generic images were used for multiple states (images labeled Massachusetts have in fact depicted covered bridges in the Midwest).

      While covered bridges were built in all regions of Massachusetts, they were most common in the western and central hills. With 69 structures on record, Franklin County, which is bisected by the Connecticut River and is home to some of its largest tributaries including the Deerfield, North, and Millers Rivers, was the state’s covered bridge center. Roughly 30 roofed spans were situated in the neighboring towns of Colrain and Greenfield alone, and today the county hosts four of the state’s remaining historic bridges. Thanks largely to its geographic size (an area roughly as large as Franklin, Hampshire, and Hampden Counties combined), Worcester County was a close runner-up, with 62 bridges. There were 46 covered bridges in Berkshire County, 43 in Hampden County, and 18 in Hampshire County.

      Comparatively few covered bridges were located in the eastern region, where the climate is milder, the topography leveler, and the tidal rivers slower and gentler. The 13 roofed structures once found in Essex County along the Merrimack River Valley included several of the state’s oldest and largest covered bridges, including the 800-foot-long Palmer and Rocks Bridges in Haverhill. There were roughly 20 more in Middlesex, Suffolk, Plymouth, Bristol, and Norfolk Counties combined.

      From their heyday in the mid-to-late 19th century, covered bridges rapidly declined throughout Massachusetts and the rest of North America. Many structures, including well-known landmarks such as Springfield’s famous Old Toll Bridge, the Long Bridge in Charlemont, and the Cheapside Bridge in Greenfield, were simply deemed obsolete and replaced by open iron, steel, and concrete structures built to accommodate increasingly-heavy automotive traffic. As the volume of motor vehicles increased, so did the chances of damage caused by accidents or oversized and overloaded vehicles, such as the truck that caused Greenfield’s Smead Bridge to collapse into a pile of timbers in the Green River in 1932.

      Fire was also an ever-present danger. Accidental blazes destroyed several structures, including those at South Royalston, Chicopee, and Mill Street in Greenfield during the early 1900s, and Northampton’s South Street Bridge burned during the town’s Forth of July celebration in 1893. The Upper Bridge in Sheffield, the Pumping Station Bridge in Greenfield, and Hadley’s Hockanum Bridge all survived the various storms, winters, and years of vehicle use, only to sadly be done in by late–20th century arsonists.

      The bridges were constantly stressed, of course, by New England’s ever-notorious weather. In addition to the high waters that passed closely beneath—and often inundated—the fragile, exposed wooden floors each spring, the region endured several significant floods over the course of the 20th century. Chief among these were two especially devastating storms during the late 1930s that destroyed 20 of Massachusetts’s remaining covered bridges, many of which were in marginal condition to begin with.

      The great floods of March 1936 were the result of an unusual series of late-winter rainstorms that slowly passed over the northeastern United States while there was still a considerable snowpack across most of the region. The heaviest precipitation fell across the mountains of northern New England, rapidly thawing a season’s worth of snowfall and unleashing extraordinary volumes of water that were abruptly released into hundreds of rivers and their tributaries. Roads, mills, dams, and bridges were swept away throughout all six states of the region, and there were even fears that the Connecticut River dam at Vernon on the Vermont-Massachusetts line would

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