National Register of Historic Places

When I posted the other day about the Burkeville Covered Bridge being on the National Register of Historic Places, I got to thinking about whether I'd seen all the suitably historic bridges in the Hartford, Connecticut area -- my area.

I downloaded the entire database in one comprehensive Excel formatted spreadsheet. I don't have Microsoft's Excel program, but was pleased to see the file opened fine in OpenOffice Calc. I filtered the sheet by State = Connecticut, Object Type = Structure and Name contains "Bridge" to get a list of all the registered historic bridges in Connecticut, copied those to a new sheet and did the same for Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

If I ever find myself running low on bridges or just don't feel like traveling all that far to get to one, I can now just open the spreadsheet and pick one off a list. Someone has taken the entire list and moved it into Wikipedia, so often there's more detail available online.

My car has just come out of the shop with a rebuilt engine and a warning to treat it gently for the first few hundred miles. So this weekend, instead of going off to Poughkeepsie, I figured I might just go see the bridges here in Hartford County.

I was shocked to see I'd missed some. Bulkeley Bridge I have, of course. The Main Street bridge in Hartford I got one cold morning. That was taken with the old camera with the scratched lens, though, and I wouldn't mind taking that one again. The Town Bridge in Canton was a favorite that I felt I didn't capture well. I photographed the bridge on Meadow Road in Farmington, but never wrote about it because it wasn't a great picture. The other bridges I didn't know about at all.

So that's the plan for the weekend -- capture all the Hartford County bridges that are registered as historic places.

The Canton, Simsbury and Windsor bridges all cross (I believe) the Farmington River. This river has a wonderful, paved bike trail along large sections and more ragged trails on the other sections, so that would be a potential bike trip. Or follow the Connecticut River up from Windsor to Suffield and get those three -- the Melrose Road one appears to be abandoned and hidden in some underbrush, best to find with a bike. I can get the two Hartford ones on my bike this morning if I wanted.

But to get all of these in one day requires a car. Anyway. Historic register is good stuff.