Vermont Covered Bridges: Detour

Saturday, July 27, 2013 Part 2

Following our visit to Lyndon we planned to head down to the Thetford area. A glimpse at the map let us know that there were no covered bridges between the two locations that we hadn't seen yet so we took a detour down route 135 in New Hampshire. Guess what? New Hampshire has beautiful covered bridges too! Just off route 302 we toured the beautifully maintained Haverhill - Bath bridge. I bet this would be a great wedding venue as long as you kept the guest list under 200! This bridge is 256.3 feet long.

Haverhill - Bath Covered Bridge - New Hampshire

Impressive arch.

This is a town lattice bridge.

Nope I wouldn't let Dan carve his name. Someone beat him to it.

We took another short detour up 302 to the unique town of Bath. I wanted to show Dan a bridge that I had seen last week after making a car delivery in Littleton, New Hampshire. This is the Bath Covered Bridge. It is 374'6" long and is made up of spans of 117'6", 66'6", 62'6", and 80'0". We will have to stop by when the restoration is complete. Both of the bridges we saw in New Hampshire are longer than the ones we have seen in Vermont so far.

Bath Covered Bridge

Next to the Bath Covered Bridge we found The Brick Store, the oldest continuously operating general store in America. Very cute.

Everyone is offered a free sample!

Delicious!

Yup. We bought some. Buy four squares get two free. What a deal. (I'm back ... just had a fudge break!)

We thought we were going to buy lunch there but got the fudge instead. So our next stop was back in Vermont at the Newbury Village store. We bought BLT's to go and ate them in a little park in Bradford.

The mosaic above the Snapple cooler in the Newbury Village Store is of the Bedell Covered Bridge. This bridge linked Newbury, VT with Haverhill, NH. It was the second longest bridge in the United States at 396 feet. It had been rebuilt several times. A Save the Bedell Bridge Committee raised $250,000 to rebuild the bridge, which was completed by 1978 and rededicated on July 22, 1979 only to be blown away again by a windstorm on September 14, 1979. How disappointing for all of those supporters.

After our detour we finally arrived in Thetford and easily found two more bridges. The Sayers bridge or Thetford Center bridge is a Haupt truss bridge.

Haupt Truss.

In the center of Thetford we turned on to Academy Road (which passes Thetford Academy). This winding scenic road leads to the Union Village Bridge. Another well maintained bridge. Perhaps the windows are screened to keep daredevils from leaping into the Ompompanoosuc River below!

Just beyond the bridge we made a brief u-turn as we had to go back and snap a few pictures of this stone wall. Clever.

I made Dan take another short detour into South Royalton. I wanted a closer look at the beautiful bell tower above Debevoise Hall at the Vermont Law School. "Debevoise Hall, a strikingly elegant structure built in 1893 as South Royalton’s first centralized graded school, anchors the Vermont Law School campus. Its distinctive bell tower—eight tiny triangular dormers whimsically circle the roofline—can be seen from anywhere in the surrounding village and by travelers on Interstate 89." (http://www.vermontlaw.edu/experience_vls/the_campus/debevoise_hall.htm)