The Old Boardman Bridge: Iron Where Wood Used to Be

The old bridge that spans the Housatonic River on Boardman Road in New Milford is not a covered wooden bridge, though it sits at a crossing where a covered wooden bridge once stood. It is something rarer: a lenticular truss bridge made of wrought iron, one of only three surviving examples of its type in Connecticut.

Crossings at this point on the Housatonic go back to the early settlement of New Milford. In eighteen forty a wooden toll bridge was erected at Boardman's crossing, serving farmers and travelers moving between the river's banks. The flood of eighteen fifty-four swept it away, as New England river floods habitually did to wooden structures. A rebuilt crossing followed, but the long-term answer would have to be sturdier.

In eighteen eighty-seven and eighteen eighty-eight, the Berlin Iron Bridge Company of East Berlin, Connecticut, erected a new bridge at the site. The design was a lenticular truss, a form in which both the upper and lower chords of the bridge bow outward in a lens shape, creating an elegant silhouette and a structure that distributes load efficiently across its span. The Berlin Iron Bridge Company was one of the leading producers of this bridge type in New England, building dozens of lenticular trusses across the region in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Most have since been demolished or replaced. The Boardman Bridge is among the survivors.

The bridge carried road traffic until it was closed to vehicles in nineteen eighty-four and to pedestrians in nineteen eighty-five. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-six. The Town of New Milford has sought for years to restore it and reopen it to foot traffic, preserving one of the clearest examples of nineteenth-century iron bridge engineering left in the state.

For now the bridge stands over the Housatonic much as it has since Cleveland's first term, a wrought-iron lens arching over a river that has been swallowing its crossings since the first farmers arrived here in seventeen oh-seven.