Photographs of the Bridges
New Hampshire Covered Bridges
New Hampshire is one of my favorite places to spend full days wandering and viewing covered bridges. The state has almost 60 historic covered bridges. Some of them, including Bath Village and Haverhill-Bath, date from as early as 1829, and are almost 200 years old. New Hampshire also has some of the longest covered bridges in the US, including Bath Village at almost 400 feet long, and Haverhill-Bath at more than 250 feet long. While many covered bridge hot spots have mostly gray, unattractive bridges, a large number of the New Hampshire bridges are decoratively painted in multiple colors, highlighting the roof, portal, siding, and wooden structural beams. Examples include Ashuelot and Carlton in the southwest corner of the state, and Swift River and Saco River near Conway, in the White Mountains. Another unusual feature is the way that the state has made the covered bridges very tourist-friendly. Most of the bridges have at least a small parking lot so that five or ten cars can visit at a time. This may not sound like a major issue, until you visit some other covered bridge hot spots and find that there is no available parking at the bridges. They have also sequentially numbered the bridges, facilitating web applications, maps, and other ways to make it easy to find the bridges.
In 2023, I attended the fall meeting of the Vermont Covered Bridge Society in Woodstock, Vermont. As I flew into New Hampshire, and had a hotel in New Hampshire, I actually spent most of extra days touring New Hampshire covered bridges, rather than those of Vermont. In the end, I visited more than 20 covered bridges in about 3 days.
