Maine once had 120 covered bridges, but fire, flood, development, and the great freshet of 1896 reduced their number to eight. Six of Maine’s covered bridges are tucked away throughout the beautiful Lakes and Mountains region. Maine’s covered bridges were built between the 1800s and early 1900s and would have rotted and disappeared years ago were it not for the protection of their protective wooden roofs.

Typically, covered bridges were put together by local builders, and like Maine-built ships, the skillful construction that went into them was more a matter of instinctive craftsmanship than engineering training. The designs used were those of professional bridge builders - Palmer, Burr, Town, Long, and Howe - who held patents on different types of trusses. Their ideas went back to ancient principles.

The first bridge across the Kennebec River at Augusta was a Palmer design; an open structure put up by a private company when Maine was still a district of Massachusetts. The covered bridge, which replaced it in 1819, is thought to be the first of its kind in the state.

The two longest covered bridges in Maine, no longer in existence, were the Bangor-Brewer Bridge, a 792-foot structure across the Penobscot River built in 1846 at a cost of $60,000.; and the bridge at Norridgewock, a 600-foot structure across the Kennebec River.

According to one historian of covered bridges, the double-barreled Stillwater Bridge near Orono was the last two-lane Town lattice truss-covered bridge in the United States. (It was replaced in 1951.)

In 1956 the Little Black River Covered Bridge in Allagash Plantation was the last wooden covered bridge to be deliberately removed to make room for modern steel and concrete bridge.

Two of the remaining covered bridges in Maine use a Long truss - Lowes Bridge and Robyville Bridge. One uses a Howe truss - Babbs. The other five are of Paddleford construction (a modified Long truss) - Lovejoy, Hemlock, Bennett, Sunday River, and Porter-Parsonsfield. Two of these, Hemlock and Porter-Parsonsfield, are strengthened with laminated wooden arches.

In several cases, modern steel and concrete structures have been built nearby to serve the traffic formerly carried by the covered bridges. These by-passed wooden structures have been "retired" to pass their final days as picturesque symbols of the Yankee ingenuity and skill of the early bridge builders of Maine. Several other bridges have been ingeniously reinforced to allow continued use by vehicles, thereby maintaining the authentic character of the bridge's environment. This reinforcement has required only minor alterations to the floor systems and is obvious only to the most avid bridge enthusiast.

In 1959, the Maine legislature enacted a law to preserve Maine's covered bridges. There were ten at the time and it became the mission of the Maine Department of Transportation to begin to renovate those covered bridges with state money provided as part of the new preservation law.

The Maine Department of Transportation still does the repairs and renovations on eight remaining covered bridges so that we can keep these pieces of Maine history around for generations.

In 1985 the 112th Maine legislature took its latest steps providing authority to the Department of Transportation to maintain and preserve historic bridges having a unique design.

Covered bridges aren’t the only historic and unusual spans in the state. Bailey Island’s crib stone bridge in Harpswell was based on a Scottish design. It uses carefully stacked or cribbed, slabs of granite for support. They’re tough enough to survive the elements and the ‘cribbing’ design allows the tide to flow through. The Wire Bridge in New Portland finished in 1866, is the last remaining wood-and-wire suspension bridge of its type in Maine – and maybe in America.

Maine's bridges were photographed in June 2022.