Creamery - 1879
The 1879 Creamery Covered Bridge, also called Guilford Street Bridge, is a historic covered bridge in West Brattleboro, Windham County, Vermont. Now closed to traffic, the Town lattice truss bridge formerly carried Guilford Road across Whetstone Brook. This is Brattleboro's last surviving 19th-century covered bridge, the last of what was once a large number of covered bridges in Brattleboro. The bridge was closed to traffic in 2010.
The Creamery Covered Bridge consists of a single span supported by two flanking timber Town lattice trusses, with a covered sidewalk attached to the eastern (downstream) side of the span. The abutments which support the ends of the bridge are built of stone slabs, though the northern abutment has been faced with concrete. The bridge is 80 feet long and 19 feet wide, with a 15-foot roadway; the attached sidewalk is 5.5 feet wide.
Constructed of spruce lumber, the Creamery Bridge lacked a sidewalk until about 1920. Among other alterations made to the bridge, its original wood shingles have been replaced with slate; and corrugated metal sheeting covers the roof over the sidewalk whose pitch follows that of the main roof. Two guy cables have been strung from the western side of the bridge to the river bank to provide additional lateral support for the superstructure.
On the exterior, the large planks pegged together diagonally to form the trusses (and sidewalls) of the bridge are partly sheathed with flush boards hung vertically. Above waist level and inward eleven feet from the portals, the trusses have been left exposed along both sides of the bridge. Except on the northeast corner, vertical flush boards protect the ends of the trusses immediately inside the portals. The sidewalk is also open above the waist level to the roof. The gables of the bridge are enclosed with flush vertical boards, with cross arms and holes for utility wires that were formerly strung through the bridge. The wood siding of the bridge and the sidewalk is painted red.
Of the over 500 covered bridges built in Vermont, as of 2019, only 104 remain.
Posted to the National Register of Historic Places on August 28, 1973.
Located at: N42 50.985 W72 35.147 - WGCB #45-13-01
Photographed in July of 2019.