Photo by Sfoskett (CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons). Worrall Bridge, Rockingham, Vermont, a lattice-truss cousin of the bridge in this story.

Taftsville Bridge: Vermont's Two-Year Detour

On the morning of August 28, 2011, Tropical Storm Irene shoved a load of river debris into the foundation of the Taftsville Covered Bridge. The bridge didn't fall. That's the strange part. It stood there, 175 years old, looking fine from the road, and was too weakened to carry a car.

Three washouts and a fourth try

Taftsville sits on the Ottauquechee River in Woodstock, Vermont, and the river has never been polite. Bridges at this crossing were swept away in 1807, 1811 and 1828. After the third one, the town clearly decided to build something that would stay put, and in 1836 a builder named Solomon Emmons III (some sources spell it Salmond Edmunds) put up the bridge that is still there.

It's a big one for Vermont: 189 feet long and 20 feet wide, in two spans of 89 and 100 feet, resting on a single stone pier in the middle of the river. The framing is what the Historic American Engineering Record calls a modified multiple kingpost truss with semi-independent arches. Translate that as a long row of simple upright-and-diagonal triangles, with wooden arches added to help carry the load. No patented Burr or Town design here, just a country builder who knew what timber does under weight.

Altered, repeatedly

Nobody should call this bridge untouched. The record lists changes in 1869, 1910, 1952-53 and 2011-13, and the arches seem to be later additions. Old bridges that survive do so because someone keeps fixing them, and Taftsville has been fixed more often than most. It went on the National Register of Historic Places on August 28, 1973. Exactly thirty-eight years before Irene, as it happens, which is the kind of coincidence a bridge enthusiast tells you about twice.

Photo by Sfoskett (CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons). Brown Bridge in Shrewsbury, Vermont, uses lattice framing, a different truss from Taftsville's kingposts.

What a closed bridge costs

About 1,100 cars crossed Taftsville every day before the storm. Afterward they took long detours, for roughly two years. The Taftsville Country Store, right across the road, reported profits down 30 to 40 percent while the bridge sat closed. People talk about covered bridges as scenery. This one was also a shortcut that a village depended on.

The repair was serious surgery: the south span was rebuilt entirely, and the whole project came to $2.5 million, about $100,000 over budget. It reopened in September 2013, the third Upper Valley bridge to come back after Irene.

Back in service, and back in trouble

Reopening didn't end the drama. Large trucks have hit the bridge since, including one incident reported in the Valley News in 2017. A wooden bridge that took a flood on the chin can still lose an argument with a box truck that ignored the height sign.

If you go, park and walk it. Stand on the deck and feel how the planks move a little under your boots, then look at the long run of timber overhead. Then look at the river and remember it already took three bridges at this spot before this one.

Sources: Historic American Engineering Record (HAER VT-30) via the Library of Congress; Vermont Public (2013); Gribble Nation.