Stone Railroad Bridges Span Centuries

Tucked into a wild New England crack when it was the frontier, a string of dry-laid stone bridges spans the centuries in lonely tribute to a craft as old as ancient Rome.

“It’s like coming upon an ancient ruin in the jungle,” said Tad Ames, director of the Berkshire Natural Resources Council. “It’s as if they were built by an ancient civilization instead of our own.”

It was at the birth of the Industrial Revolution in the 1830s when George Washington Whistler, the father of painter James McNeill Whistler, laid out a viaduct climbing the Westfield River gorge into the Berkshires to link the Boston seaport with the Erie Canal at Albany, N.Y.

“At the time The Western was the steepest railroad in the world--so steep that when they started building, they didn’t have any engines that could climb the grade,” said David Pierce, a railroad enthusiast from nearby Huntington who for decades has been painstakingly piecing together the history of the long-forgotten craftsmen and engineers.

Originally Whistler, one of the first American-trained engineers produced by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., strung 10 bridges up the wild river gorge to provide wide enough curves for trains to negotiate the eight-mile-long climb.

Borrowing from ancient Roman engineers, he used stone arches to gain the strength needed to carry the trains. The arches were pieced together without mortar by Irish and Scottish craftsmen from square blocks of the tortoise-shell brown granite of the surrounding cliffs.

Each 50-foot-wide bridge rose higher than the last until the highest surviving arch soars more than 70 feet above the tumbling trout and salmon stream.

He built so well that Amtrak trains still rumble over three of the bridges, including a graceful double arch in Middlefield. The double arch is the only one of the five surviving bridges that can be glimpsed from a road.

Two more arch bridges were abandoned by the railroad shortly after the turn of the century when the invention of dynamite allowed it to ease one of the worst curves on the route.

And for generations the bridges--a two-mile hike from the nearest country road--have been the haunt of nesting ravens, local children and the occasional awe-struck engineer.

“I’ve been going out there all my life,” said Allen William, who owns a nearby quarry and was one of the people who rallied to save the abandoned bridges, now owned by the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. “It’s so special and so beautiful.

“They are purely functional with no embellishments,” he said.

Vandals have knocked some of the capstones from the bridges, and trees have sprouted among the dry-laid stones. But they have weathered man’s abandonment well, he said.

“They were the first stone-arch railroad bridges built in the U.S. and among the last,” Pierce said.

Still, other stone bridges can be found tucked into the nation’s nooks and crannies from West Virginia to downtown Minneapolis.

Three years ago, the Westfield River and the spectacular gorge received federal protection as one of the nation’s wild and scenic rivers.

And now, aided by a $46,000 federal grant aimed at protecting the nation’s industrial artifacts, a diverse consortium of wildlife enthusiasts, history buffs and state and local agencies are drawing up plans to create a formal foot trail to the bridges owned by the state.

“They’ve survived for 150 years without much attention and with a bit of care, and they will last us another 150 years,” said Chris Curtins, a planner with the Pioneer Valley Regional Planning Board, which is overseeing the preservation work.