Today, the Hartland Covered Bridge is the longest covered bridge in the world — a pretty remarkable feat for a bridge that was never meant to be covered.
In 1898, the people of Hartland, on one side of the Saint John/Wolastoq River, and Somerville on the other, had no bridge. They asked the government for one. The government pointed out that they already had two bridges nearby-ish — one in Woodstock, one in Florenceville — and surely that was plenty.
The people were unimpressed.
So they decided to build it themselves.
The Hartland Bridge Company formed and sold stock in 1899. Things moved fast: the contract was tendered that October, and by December it had gone to Albert Brewer, who claimed he could do the job for only $27,945 and have it done in only one year.
“I doubt the people of Hartland could get a substantial stone and steel structure there even for $34,000”, scoffed future premier Douglas Hazen in the Legislature.
It took nearly two years. Freak rainstorms in October 1900 caused massive floods up and down the river, just like a spring freshet. In the end, Hazen was proven right: the bridge came to $35,000.
The first person to cross the bridge did it before it was completed. On May 13th, 1901, Dr. A. W. Estey gingerly picked his way across the construction site to respond to a medical emergency on the other side.
The bridge was officially opened on July 4th, 1901 (a date chosen not out of any love for American independence, but to coincide with the end of a legislative session so the politicians could attend).
4,000 people came from far and wide to see the grand opening, including virtually the entire population of Woodstock. And why wouldn’t they, boasted The Carleton Sentinel newspaper, for the bridge “connects three of the best parishes in the country.”
A parade marched around Hartland, then crossed the bridge. The first person to cross the bridge (officially) was the company’s secretary-treasurer, S.S. Miller. Next to cross was “a bicycle procession with 20 nice looking girls,” wrote the Sentinel. Only after that came Premier Tweedie, followed by a long line of private carriages.
But the bridge wasn’t covered.
Why would it be?
Think about winter travel back then. It was too early for cars. They wouldn’t travel in wagons, surely, not in the snow. They travelled in horse-drawn sleds in winter. A bridge without snow on it would have been terribly inconvenient.
It was a for-profit toll bridge. The tolls weren’t even waived for the grand opening, noted the Moncton Transcript: $8 was collected that first afternoon from pretty bicyclists, the premier, and everyone else.
A toll bridge was about as popular as you’d expect.
The official story of the toll removal is that, on March 7, 1907, a bill was introduced to the Legislature to remove the toll because “it was considered desirable and in the public interest that the bridge be free.”
The local version, as recorded by Telegraph-Journal reporter Ian Sclanders in 1937, is more colourful. A sour anti-toll mood was stirred up by fiery-local-schoolteacher-turned-politician J. K. Flemming. One day, Mr. Pearson, the toll-keeper, didn’t show up for work. An elderly admirer of Flemming’s named Sam Harmon climbed onto the bridge, fired his revolver four times in the air and declared: “The bridge is free! To J. K. Flemming be all the credit!” (Flemming would go on to become premier in a massive landslide.)
In 1920, the bridge was severely damaged. An ice jam smashed the bridge’s centre pier, completely sweeping two whole spans downriver. On April 16th, Frederictonians gathered along their waterfront to watch the bridge float past their city, the Daily Gleaner reported, “in several sections but with much of the spans still intact.”
The provincial government immediately passed a bill to fix the damaged concrete pier. But only the pier. Rebuilding the spans was a whole other question. The cost of steel had remained prohibitively expensive since the First World War.
“If you wait until the price of steel goes down, the government will build you a steel bridge,” Premier Peter Veniot told a delegation from Hartland. The delegation was unimpressed.
An unusual cross-party compromise was reached between the Liberal premier and the Conservative delegation. The delegation got their bridge now, but it would be wood, not steel. Veniot got his savings, and future savings too, because a roof would be built the length of the bridge to keep the boards from rotting.
This, however, required a second compromise because even in 1920 the dominant winter vehicle was still sleds.
“As a matter of fact,” wrote Sclanders, “the government has to hire a man to put snow on it in winter time so that the sleds can get across. It costs $100 to $150 a year.”
The covering did not go smoothly. In a curious repetition of history, that October brought severe rainstorms, floods, washouts and even train derailments across the province — the worst, the Daily Gleaner noted, since October 1900. The rising water “swept away the plant engaged in rebuilding the Hartland bridge,” obliterating some ten weeks of work worth many thousands of dollars. A four-ton engine went into the river and was never recovered.
Once the bridge was covered, it still wasn’t the longest covered bridge in the world. At 1,282 feet, it was dwarfed by the Clarks Ferry Bridge in Pennsylvania, which had been built three-quarters of a century earlier and spanned 2,088 feet.
But, only four years later, Pennsylvania announced it would replace its bridge with a concrete one. In May 1924, Hartland became home to the longest covered bridge in the world.
Nobody noticed. In fact, it seems to have taken quite a few years for New Brunswickers to realise what they had. Only about nine years later did it begin to be widely touted in tourism literature as the longest covered bridge in the world.
“There was one in Norway they used to say was longer, but somebody wrote away and got the measurements and it’s not. It was 200 feet shorter,” explained Sclanders.
And so it turned out that Hartland had the longest covered bridge in the world — a truly remarkable accomplishment for a bridge that wasn’t originally covered.
And so New Brunswickers should be thankful that the price of steel was sky-high in 1920, because if it wasn’t, Hartland would have a steel bridge. And while that may have been nice and modern, plenty of places have nice, modern steel bridges.
But only New Brunswick has the longest covered bridge in the world!
