"If You Love Covered Bridges..." Top 5 Page for this destination New Hampshire Things to Do Tip by deecat

Visitors flock to New Hampshire to tour its famous covered bridges, and some of these bridges are over 150 years old.

More than sixty covered bridges still exist in New Hampshire. All of them have roofs and wooden sides; yet, no two bridges are exactly alike! A new fact that I learned about wooden bridges while in New Hampshire was that the earliest ones had openings based on the height and width of a load of hay!

I also learned that Covered Bridges in New Hampshire are sometimes called "Courting bridges" or "kissing bridges". They are given these names because young people took advantage of the privacy of a covered bridge to court each other and to steal a kiss now and then!

These covered-truss bridges and wooden-ark bridges are composed of a roadway, wooden sides, and a roof. The slanting roofs built over the bridges were there to protect them in winter by forcing snow to slide off; thus, no snow buildup that would weaken the structure. The roofs were protection from sudden showers or sleet, and the sides helped control a skittish horse.
It's ironic that road workers at that time had to shovel snow inside the bridges to allow the passage of horse-drawn sleds!

The many covered bridges in New Hampshire are numbered, and this numbering system is used on state tourist maps.

The longest bridge is the one that joins Cornish, New Hampshire and Windsor, Vermont (It's also the longest one in the USA!)
It spans the Connecticult River and is 460 feet long!

The oldest covered bridge in the state is also the oldest in the nation and is called the Warner-Dalton Bridge near Warner Village, New Hampshire. It was built in 1800.

A very pretty Covered Bridge that is painted White is in Stark, New Hampshire. It is perhaps the most often photographed of the bridges.

I also enjoyed seeing the mostly red-stained bridge in Conway called the Swift River Bridge.