New Hampshire Town Tries to Bridge Troubled Waters

The shortcomings of the nation’s oldest covered bridge became painfully clear one day back in 1994, when an ambulance speeding to pick up a 6-year-old girl had to make a 20-minute detour because the timbers couldn’t bear the weight.

The ambulance service said a quicker response probably wouldn’t have saved the girl’s life, but her parents’ grief galvanized local leaders to ask the state for a $2.4-million concrete-and-steel bridge that is now being built no more than 200 feet away.

The 1829 Haverhill-Bath covered bridge can’t handle the demands of the 20th century. Weathered and shabby, it tilts downstream and can barely carry its own weight. Its 3-ton limit, low clearance and narrow width make it unsafe for anything more than one car at a time.

Even so, folks aren’t going to give up on the Haverhill-Bath span, for covered bridges--a romantic symbol of New England itself--are regarded with love and affection around here.

Abandoning the Haverhill-Bath bridge “would be unthinkable,” says 71-year-old Lee Kryger, whose house stands next to it in a bend of the Ammonoosuc River.

From her kitchen-living room in Woodsville, a village within Haverhill of about 1,000 people 150 miles northwest of Boston, she can watch otters splashing under the bridge and cars and people crossing it.

“I think how remarkable it is that this bridge has carried oxen and carriages and cars nearly 200 years, connecting these rural communities,” she says.

Kryger’s bridge committee is one of several such groups in New Hampshire communities working to preserve covered bridges. They raise money any way they can, from selling T-shirts and raffle tickets for quilts to lobbying for money from government sources, including the National Historic Covered Bridge Preservation Act now making its way through Congress.

Arnold Graton, whose family has been restoring covered bridges for three generations, estimates that upgrading the Haverhill-Bath bridge so it could keep carrying cars would cost $1 million, an amount that Kryger says “is out of the question for us.”

Instead, the committee hopes to raise up to $400,000 to refurbish the bridge as a tourist attraction for pedestrians and bicyclists. Once the new bridge opens in 1999, the old one will no longer take cars.

“I’m talking dollars, tourism. We’re the gateway to the White Mountains--people coming up Interstate 91 get off at Exit 17 in Wells River, Vt., and come through Woodsville at the rate of 6,000 cars a day. But except to buy gas, they don’t stop,” says Haverhill Town Manager Glenn English. “We need to make them stop, make the bridge a destination.”

Of the 16,000 covered bridges in the country at the end of the 19th century, about 820 remain, according to the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges. Pennsylvania has the most, 221. New Hampshire has more than 50.

The number dwindles as they succumb to wind, rain, ice jams, floods, fire, vandalism and neglect. The 1862 Slate Bridge in Swanzey was destroyed by fire in 1993, as were the 1835 Corbin bridge in Newport and the Smith Bridge in Plymouth, built in 1850.

Bath, the town across the bridge, has three covered bridges, counting the Haverhill-Bath span. At its town meeting two weeks ago, a committee persuaded the community of 800 to contribute $142,000 of the $709,000 needed to restore the 1849 Swiftwater Bridge over the Wild Ammonoosuc River.

“If maintained properly, they can last forever,” says Dick Roy of Manchester, a vice president of the covered bridge society.