Creamery Bridge
Franklin County, Ashfield. Built 1985, 40 ft. long. A modern queen-post truss bridge on private land, kept open to the public.
Creamery Bridge takes its name from the Ashfield Cooperative Creamery, which operated nearby from 1880 until 1927, once producing nearly 800,000 pounds of butter a year before it became more profitable for local farmers to ship their milk to a processing station in Shelburne Falls instead. The bridge itself is much younger than that history: built in 1985 on a queen-post truss, it's a modest 40-foot span across Creamery Brook.
The land the bridge sits on is privately owned, but the owners have kept it open to public visitors, and it's become a small local landmark along Creamery Road as much for its setting as for its age. It stands today as one of thirteen authentic covered bridges left in Massachusetts, and a reminder that the tradition of covered-bridge building in New England never entirely died out — it just moved from turnpike commissions to private landowners.