Vermont is the state most people associate with covered bridges. Pennsylvania and Ohio have more of them, but Vermont is a small place and the state’s 100 existing covered bridges are very visible. Exactly how many were built will never be known but probably at least 700; Windsor County alone had over 100.
The archival record reflects this richness. Travelers began recording Vermont’s covered bridges before 1930. Many of their photographs survive, along with the original negatives. The challenge is not in finding the images but in deciding which ones to choose. For this book we selected views that are not likely to be found in other sources.
Many of the photographs show a landscape of great beauty, which readers may think never existed in reality. Such was most of Vermont in the first half of the 20th century. It is a mystery why so many people today dismiss beauty as impossible or deride it as sentimental. In Vermont, perhaps more than anywhere, there has been an appreciation of the old rural landscape. Agriculture made it possible, and the economy now works strongly against most farmers. The means of earning a living today do not work in favor of rural preservation. There is no reason why new construction should ruin the old, but most of what is built in what was once the country is clearly of suburban rather than of rural inspiration, even in Vermont.
The covered bridges still remain as reminders of the old rural culture. They were built of wood and roofed to protect the structural timbers from rot. Long ago they served cities too, but mostly the rural examples are what remain, and in the popular imagination, the covered bridge is a powerful symbol of country life.
The first known American covered bridge was completed in Philadelphia in 1805, but the idea did not reach Vermont until the 1820s. By then, designers had developed several different truss types for construction, and the later 19th century brought further improvements. Styles of medieval origin, such as the queenpost, were widely used for shorter spans. For longer bridges, the Burr truss had a multiple kingpost frame with vertical posts, and braces between them inclined toward the center. A timber arch was bolted to this, which is the most obvious feature of the design, and it proved popular in much of central and northwestern Vermont. The Town lattice truss used a lattice of sawn planks pegged together with wooden treenails (pronounced trunnels). Widely used in Vermont, it was found everywhere in the southern part of the state and in various parts of the north. A rare and interesting variant used squared notched timbers instead of flat planks, and although there were only seven known examples, this type was given so much attention by earlier writers that it is sometimes locally regarded as another major style. Peter Paddleford of nearby Littleton, New Hampshire, developed a special truss using an elongated counter tie to help distribute the load. It was often used in northeastern Vermont.
The Howe truss, first patented in 1840, introduced adjustable iron tie rods and was a distinctly modern innovation. It was widely used for railroad bridges in the state but found only a spotty acceptance for road bridges among Vermont’s conservative local builders. Several later and very efficient designs, such as the Smith truss, appeared elsewhere in the second half of the 19th century, but they never received any foothold in Vermont, where officials preferred the tried-and-true earlier designs.
A complete history of all of the covered bridges ever built in Vermont would amount to an encyclopedia and is well beyond the scope of this modest volume. Richard Sanders Allen wrote two excellent and complete county histories, both published by Stephen Greene Press in Brattleboro, which are now out of print: Rare Old Covered Bridges of Windsor County, Vermont and Windham County’s Famous Covered Bridges. The latter was based on a series of newspaper articles by Victor Morse, published in the Brattleboro Daily Reformer in the 1930s. Allen’s Covered Bridges of the Northeast is happily back in print. For a general history of covered bridges in the United States and Canada, readers may consult my Covered Bridges Across North America (St. Paul, Minnesota: MBI, 2004). Joseph C. Nelson and Ed Barna have both written on Vermont’s existing bridges, and their works are widely available.
This book is arranged geographically, starting in the southwest, proceeding north to Burlington and then to the southeast. Next is the central part of the state and, finally, the northern tier of counties, from west to east. The images represent only a sampling of Vermont’s beauty. We hope they will inspire people to preserve covered bridges everywhere, keeping them in authentic repair by means of the same honest and efficient 19th-century technology that brought them into existence in the first place.
—Joseph D. Conwill
P.O. Box 829
Rangeley, Maine 04970