Thompson Covered Bridge, West Swanzey, NH

West Swanzey / Thompson Covered Bridge

Sorry about the reflections. I wasn't using a lens hood and this is what happens.

The West Swanzey Covered Bridge, AKA the Thompson Bridge, was built in 1832 by Zadoc Taft for the princely sum of $523.27. Zadoc isn't a name you see every day. He's not even the most famous Zadoc Taft -- that honor goes to renowned sculptor Lorado Zadoc Taft.

Our Zadoc Taft, though, was a local boy, born, raised and died in the area. The Register of Historical Places entry for this bridge lists Taft as a master workman, but by the 1850 census, he called himself a blacksmith. Further information about Z. Taft isn't easily found; there was a Revolutionary War soldier by that name who lived in southern Massachusetts near where I grew up, apparently unrelated, and another around the same time who ran a mill in Bennington, Vermont, where my sister went to college. That could conceivably be the same person, as Richmond and Bennington were probably within a few hours travel by train, but it seems unlikely.

The Thompson Covered Bridge crosses the Ashuelot River, connecting the town of Swanzey with the village of West Swanzey. It's a two span, 155 foot long, single web Town lattice bridge. The sides are open and use the beautiful Town lattice as a decorative element. There is a sidewalk on the south side of the bridge; there apparently was another on the north side when the bridge was built. It's not known to me what happened to it.

By the early 1970s, increasing traffic was taking a toll on the wooden bridge. Although there is now another bridge nearby to carry trucks, buses and other heavy traffic, in the 70s the weight limit was six tons. School buses would drop their kids off on one side of the bridge, drive to the other, and weight for the kids to cross the bridge, board the bus, and continue on its way. Currently, the bridge is signed for only three tons of traffic -- one car at a time on the bridge's single lane.

The Thompson Covered Bridge is #5 in the southern New Hampshire covered bridge registry. Of all the covered bridges I've seen here in New England, this is the most beautiful and best preserved. It looked substantially similar to this in 1832, 180 years ago. Zadoc Taft should be proud.

Contoocook Railroad Bridge, Contoocook, NH

Contoocook Covered Bridge

The Contoocook Covered Bridge, crossing the Contoocook River in the Contoocook village part of Hopkinton, New Hampshire, bills itself as the "oldest surviving covered railroad bridge in the world". That's a lot of qualifications, but it's still an impressive piece of covered bridge history.

Constructed in 1889 on the piers of an earlier bridge, it was built at a time when New England was turning to iron bridges, such as those built by the famous Berlin Iron Bridge Company. Its relative newness could be responsible for its longevity, maybe.

This bridge was probably designed by the Boston & Maine Railroad engineer Jonathan Parker Snow and built by carpenter David Hazelton. The B&M railroad used wooden bridges long after most other railroads had moved to iron.

Tradition. It's New England!

Double Town lattice

The Contoocook covered railroad bridge sports a rather unique double Town lattice construction, with a second lattice bolted to the outside of the first. This probably helped take the weight of trains as they came through to the nearby depot. I have not seen that in any other covered bridge, but Wikipedia claims it wasn't uncommon in northern New England and a few other examples survive to this day.

This bridge was used as a working railroad bridge to 1962, weathering a number of disasters, including the 1938 hurricane that nearly wiped out Providence, Rhode Island. Between 1962 and 1990 it was used as a warehouse. In 2006, the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges paid for some necessary upgrades, and in 2010 the NH Department of Transportation modernized the lighting and fire suppression system -- you can see the red fire alarm button midway down the bridge wall in the picture above.

Portal to Contoocook Covered Bridge

I used to live twenty miles from this bridge when I was a kid, but I didn't know it even existed until a couple weeks ago. Used to ride to Hopkinton on my bike a lot after they built this really nice bike path that follows Interstate 89 north. But it would have been being used as a warehouse back then, anyway. The pictures on the Library of Congress website (which is down at the moment, so no links) show it filled with junk. Now it stands as the centerpiece and symbol of Contoocook village.

The bridge isn't hard to get to; if you're anywhere in the Concord, NH area, get to I-89, go north to route 127 and follow the road into Contoocook. There is parking available both at the adjoining depot and a restaurant on the other end of the bridge.

Railroad bridges, Hooksett, NH

Baltimore truss railroad bridge

I wasn't going to write this picture up. There's nothing particularly historical about this bridge. I didn't even know this bridge existed.

I'm on vacation, and I'd made a promise to visit my parents graves in Concord, New Hampshire, at some point during my week off. My dad would never, ever pay a toll if he could avoid it, and particularly on I-93 between Manchester and Concord. He'd always take the back road, Route 3A, through Hooksett and Bow and into Concord, where we lived.

That's how we kids were brought up. So I was toodling along on 3A, which follows the Merrimack River, just casually looking over now and again because it's a beautiful river and it was my river growing up. Through the trees, I saw an old iron railroad bridge and figured I'd better stop by.

I didn't recognize the truss design; I looked it up when I got home and saw it was a "Baltimore truss". The railroad bridges here in Connecticut all seem to be Pratt truss, so that was new.

This closed-off railroad bridge crosses the Merrimack nearly parallel to the Baltimore truss bridge. This one appears to be a three span Pratt truss bridge with extra bracing. Or it could be a Warren truss. I don't know. The cool thing is that these bridges, right next to each other, were made using entirely different designs.

Lots of people seem to have photographed these bridges (add me to that list) and/or jumped from them, but I'm not able to find any information about them online.

Just... back roads New Hampshire, I guess.

Coombs Covered Bridge, Winchester, NH

The Coombs Covered Bridge crosses the Ashuelot River

I didn't even know this bridge existed. I'd planned my trip to New Hampshire to pass by a couple covered bridges in Massachusetts (the Eunice Williams Bridge in Greenfield and the Burkeville Covered Bridge in Conway), but hadn't even checked to see if I'd be passing any such bridges in New Hampshire. No worries, though -- NH wasn't going to let me stay ignorant. Signs on Route 10 called me out to bridges again and again. The Monadnock area has seven covered bridges -- the Coombs Bridge is #2.

This bridge was built in 1837 by Anthony Coombs Jr, whose father, Anthony Coombs, was a Massachusetts expatriate who settled in Winchester after the Revolutionary War. Coombs lived just past the bridge.

After deteriorating to uselessness, in 1964 the bridge was extensively repaired and in 1967 completely renovated, with a new tin roof, beams, and sidings. Nonetheless, the bridge still appears today much as it did in 1837. A hundred and fifty years ago, if you'd looked down the river in the month of May, this is what you'd have seen. Well, except that in the nineteenth century, most of New England was deforested and given over to farms, so it's likely there would have been a lot fewer trees. New England is more covered with forest now than it has been for hundreds of years. Urban sprawl, however, is cutting into the forests once more, and this is the kind of growth from which forests find it hard to recover.

Portal to the Coombs Covered Bridge

The split granite abutments for the bridge are fitted so closely that there is no need for mortar. The truss work is in the patented Town truss style, instead of the more common Howe truss. The designer, famed Connecticut architect Ithiel Town, licensed his patent for two dollars a foot; this 118 foot bridge would have cost $236 to license. Town's design was also used for the West Cornwall Covered Bridge and the Bull's Bridge, both in Connecticut.

The Bridges of Portsmouth, NH

General Sullivan Bridge

I moved to New Hampshire's seacoast area when I started at the University of New Hampshire, and left five years later when I moved to California to start my career of always being at the hot technology companies just after they were no longer hot. These were the first five years of my adult life; I went to school, I fell in love, I got married, worked at a radio station and three startup tech companies (EZ Data, Enterprise Systems, and a third, the owner of which would prefer I don't talk about my time there on the Internet, as I found out the last time I did so).

Anyway, EZ Data was based out of Newington, and A... the unnamed company was based out of Portsmouth, and we lived in Dover, so every single day we would cross this beautiful old bridge, the Sullivan Bridge, our first bridge of the three in this post. Below the bridge was Hilton Park, where we could bring our lunches and watch the boats sailing on Little Bay.

After we left for California, they closed the bridge, which was used for southbound traffic when we lived there, and it is now used only for pedestrian traffic. The state is now deciding whether to renovate it for traffic, just tear it down, or replace all the bridges with a super-wide bridge. These bridges are the bottleneck for traffic from the Portsmouth area to the 'burbs to the north.

I'm hoping for restoration for traffic, of course. Though it would be hideously expensive, it is the second most historic bridge in the area.

Well, that was before Portsmouth decommissioned the first most historic bridge, the Memorial Bridge.

Sarah Mildred Long Bridge

The Sarah Mildred Long Bridge is more commonly known as "the middle bridge". It connects the city of Portsmouth with Kittery, Maine, home of a naval base and the Kittery Trading Post. It is one of two drawbridges across the Piscataqua River, and with the decommissioning of the Memorial Bridge, the only one that remains.

The bascule (the moving bit) lifts every fifteen minutes during the day to allow traffic through, but this bridge has a secret. Automobile and truck traffic runs along the top, but there is a train track that runs along the bottom. If a boat comes by that could get by if the train track section just weren't there, the bridge master can slide the bottom part to the side.

The Memorial Bridge looks similar to the Long Bridge, but with curvier trusses on either side of the bascule. I'd have pictures of it, but A) they re-arranged the Portsmouth traffic so much that I couldn't find it, and B) I thought this WAS the Memorial Bridge. Which shows how memory fades after a quarter century away. Anyway, C) they decommissioned it.

I'll get it next time, what's left of it.

Piscataqua River Bridge

The Piscataqua River Bridge rises dramatically high above the Portsmouth skyline. Like the Memorial Bridge and the Long Bridge, the Piscataqua River Bridge crosses the (wait for it) Piscataqua River and connects the city with Kittery, Maine, bringing a northern cap to New Hampshire's colorful and historic eleven miles of coast.

Out of all the cities I have lived or worked in, Portsmouth was the most beautiful. Watching a live performance of "Grease" on the lawn on Strawberry Bank, staggering drunkenly through snow shrouded city streets singing sea shanties after a memorable meal at The Library, geeking out with plastic baggy video games at the Atari Computer Club, lining up outside the Jerry Lewis Cinema to see The Empire Strikes Back... it's a painfully breathtaking example of a New England seacoast town.

Sawyer Bridge AKA "Bridge to Nowhere", Hillsborough, NH

Sawyer Bridge

The stone arch bridge in Hillsborough, NH was the subject of a blistering stump speech by presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who asked how $180,000 of stimulus money was spent on a bridge that connects to no road and carries no traffic.

Bridge, in the news, in driving range -- I headed right up to get a look for myself at this "bridge to nowhere".

It's a nice enough bridge. Recently maintained, with a railing around it so you can walk around on top of it without falling into the Contoocook River, which it crosses. The Hillsborough folks say they were thinking of building a park around it, but it's certainly not in the center of anywhere.

Signs on either side of it tell the history of the bridge:

Stone Arch Bridges

Beginning in the 1830s, a few arched granite

highway bridges were built in southern New

Hampshire under the supervision of engineers

from major manufacturing centers. By the 1850s,

rural stonemasons had mastered the art of

building such bridges without mortar. Hiram

Monroe (1799-1871), active in town affairs,

persuaded Hillsborough to build a dozen. Five

survive, and a sixth is covered by Franklin

Pierce Lake. Among the local builders were

Reuben E. Loveren (1817-1883), and brothers

Calvin A. Gould (1826-1877) and James H. Gould

(1828-1890). All three worked on this, the

double-arched Sawyer Bridge, in 1866.

I'm wondering where the other four surviving stone bridges are...  It's interesting that the sign mentions that stonemasons had mastered the art of building stone bridges without mortar, while the Sawyer Bridge clearly uses a ton of mortar. Perhaps that was put in during the renovation.

According to Gilman Shattuck, historic bridges like the Sawyer Bridge are important reminders of our past.

Mr. Shattuck, a former member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives and a Democrat, also happened to be a contributor to a book of historical images of city. He wrote the chapter on bridges. Sites like the Sawyer Bridge, he said, are important history landmarks that help out with the New Hampshire tourism industry.

“We’re talking sofa money, sofa change money,” Mr. Shattuck said of the stimulus dollars funneled to the bridge. According to the Associated Press, the total amount of stimulus funding used to repair the bridge was $150,000.

Parking is pretty much anywhere. There are parking lots surrounding it. Not sure it's worth a special trip; I fit in five covered bridges and a trip to the New Hampshire seacoast along the way and that made it worthwhile to me.

Notre Dame Bridge, Manchester, NH

When I was a kid, our family lived in Linwood, Massachusetts, but all our grandparents were in Concord, New Hampshire, where both my parents had been raised. The long, two and a half hour ride in one of Dad's huge, boat-like cars was marked by three landmarks: Whalom Park, an amusement park I never had a chance to see before it closed; the diner on the Massachusetts/New Hampshire border that served french fries in a paper boat; and the huge arch of the Notre Dame Bridge in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Seeing that bridge meant we were almost to grammy's. Grammy Holloway drove me over it once in her old beige VW Beetle (though I guess it wasn't old then). It was -- incredible. I was living in California when they tore it down and replaced it with an utterly non-descript bridge. I found some video on YouTube of the bridge's last moments.