In 1959 the 99th Maine legislature took a major step by enacting a law to preserve Maine’s wooden covered bridges. The new law provided that state money could be used to save and renovate covered bridges. As a result, in 1961 the Department of Transportation undertook major renovations to the 10 remaining covered bridges.
Once there were a hundred and twenty covered bridges in the state of Maine, but fire, flood, ice, progress and the Great Freshet of 1896 have removed all but eight original bridges. Two other covered bridges, recently lost to fire and flood, have been reconstructed and are considered to have historical importance. On March 26, 1983 the Morse Bridge in Bangor was destroyed by fire; there are no plans to rebuild it. The remaining covered bridges are scattered through out the state.
The roof and siding of a covered bridge are the features that give the structure its familiar outlines. Some are thought to be more picturesque than others—Maine’s Artist’s Covered Bridge over the Sunday River in Newry, for example, has always been a favorite, and someone has said that artists have daubed more paint on their canvases depicting the structure than was ever slapped on its venerable sides. Other bridges look a little like barns unexpectedly left stranded across a stream.
The bridges were covered for one reason—to keep the rain and snow from the massive working timbers. The alternate wetting and drying out of uncovered wooden structures would have resulted in rot and failure decades sooner.
Many people think of covered bridges as quaint relics of the past. Others become expert in describing the manner in which they were built. But, in either case, they represent the inventiveness and know-how of our forefathers, and it seems fitting that they should be saluted for their engineering as well as their charm.
The ingenious way the old bridges were fitted together becomes apparent as soon as you pass through one of their portals. There, under the protecting roof, on either side, are the posts and crisscrossed braces extending from top to bottom “chord” (the chords are the heavy beams parallel to the line of the roadway). The planks of the floor are supported by the bottom chord in the typical covered bridge, which makes it a “through truss” structure.
There are no records of the men who built Maine’s covered bridges. Available town documents show that the chief concern of the thrifty citizens at town meetings was the amount of money their new bridge was to cost—which was entered to the last odd cent—and a brief line or two about its manner of construction. In the case of the Lovejoy Bridge, it was recorded that it is “... to be built of square-sawn spruce, and of the Paddleford plan, at about a cost of $743.47.”
Typically, covered bridges were put together by local builders, and like Maine-built ships, the skillful construction that went into them was more a matter of instinctive craftsmanship than engineering training. The designs used were those of professional bridge builders—Palmer, Burr, Town, Long and Howe—who held patents on different types of trusses. Their ideas went back to ancient principles.
The first bridge across the Kennebec River at Augusta was a Palmer design; an open structure put up by a private company when Maine was still a district of Massachusetts. The covered bridge, which replaced it in 1819, is thought to be the first of its kind in the state. The last-built covered bridge which still survives is the Watson Settlement Bridge, built in 1911 in Littleton.
The two longest covered bridges in Maine, no longer in existence, were the Bangor-Brewer Bridge, a 792 foot structure across the Penobscot River built in 1846 at a cost of $60,000; and the bridge at Norridgewock, a 600 foot structure across the Kennebec River.
According to one historian of covered bridges, the double-barreled Stillwater Bridge near Orono was the last two-lane Town lattice truss covered bridge in the United States (It was replaced in 1951).
Two of the remaining covered bridges in Maine use a Long truss: Lowes Bridge and Robyville Bridge. Three use a Howe truss: Morse (no longer in existance), Watson Settlement and Babbs. The other five are of Paddleford construction (a modified Long truss): Lovejoy, Hemlock, Bennett, Sunday River and Porter-Parsonsfield. Two of these, Hemlock and Porter-Parsonsfield, are strengthened with laminated wooden arches.
In several cases, modern steel and concrete structures have been built nearby to serve the traffic formerly carried by the covered bridges. These by-passed wooden structures have been “retired” to pass their final days as picturesque symbols of the Yankee ingenuity and skill of the early bridge builders of Maine. Several other bridges have been ingeniously reinforced to allow continued use by vehicles, thereby maintaining the authentic character of the bridge’s environment. This reinforcement has required only minor alterations to the floor systems and is obvious only to the most avid bridge enthusiast.
In 1956 the Little Black River Covered Bridge in Allagash Plantation was the last wooden covered bridge to be deliberately removed to make room for a modern steel and concrete bridge.
In 1985 the 112th Maine legislature took its latest steps providing authority to the Department of Transportation to maintain and preserve historic bridges having a unique design.