Kingsbury Covered Bridge
Near Woodstock, Vermont
Built in nineteen oh four across the Second Branch of the White River near Randolph, Vermont, the Kingsbury Covered Bridge is a single span on a multiple kingpost truss, a simple wooden design that New England bridge builders favored for its strength. The cover kept rain off the structural timbers, without it, an exposed wooden bridge might last only ten or fifteen years in Vermont's wet climate. With the cover, well-built bridges could last a century or more.
The Kingsbury bridge is one of about one hundred covered wooden bridges that still survive in Vermont, a number that makes the state one of the densest concentrations of covered bridges per square mile in the United States. Vermont's cold winters and dry summers, paradoxically gentler on timber than the rain-heavy mid-Atlantic, helped preserve them.
This bridge is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and still carries local vehicle traffic across the river, making it a working piece of infrastructure more than a hundred and twenty years after it was built. The same design principle that made it useful in nineteen oh four keeps it useful today.
