When I’m out shooting in the field, I don’t always know for certain how well a given image is going to “work” once I get it back home and start developing it and reflecting upon how well it does or doesn’t fulfill my creative vision. There are times when I find myself in beautiful environments which simply prove too difficult to commit to a two-dimensional composition in a way that’s faithful to my creative expectations. After all, there are all sorts of sensory experiences that contribute to our experience in the outdoors: birds chirping, changing light, clouds drifting overhead, the sound of breeze rushing through the forest canopy, maybe a brisk autumn chill in the early morning or the impressive quietude during a snowfall. Now, there are techniques that can be leveraged to suggest some these qualities in a purely visual, flat image, but there’s no way to truly reproduce them. And sometimes, when those supporting elements are lost, the visual impression that remains just doesn’t quite convey what I’d hoped it would.
But then again, there are also some outings during which everything comes together beautifully and I know the moment I release the shutter that the imagery I’m producing resonates decisively with my creative vision. “I Dreamt of the Housatonic”, my latest release which I produced last autumn, was created under just those sort of circumstances. When I came by this weathered bench overlooking the Housatonic River and West Cornwall Covered Bridge with soft morning light imparting a gentle glow, it immediately struck me as a golden opportunity.
Having meditated over what drew me so strongly to the scene, it’s tough to pin down any one facet. The image, to me, has a timeless feel that is largely removed from immediate associations with modern life. No cars, no houses with satellite dishes, no joggers in Under Armor, no power lines lazily draped across the river. Putting aside the fact that it’s clearly a modern color photograph, the scene could just as easily have looked almost identical to an observer in 1900 as it did in 2017 (okay, okay… maybe metal road signs weren’t as common back then, but you get my point). And to my sensibilities, that timeless quality also contributes to a somewhat dream-like feel: as if we might find ourselves whisked away in a blissful dream to this quiet bench in the countryside, enjoying the amaranthine solitude of a peaceful, rustic riverscape.
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A jacket of snow-dusted ice clings to shallow boulders along the banks of the Housatonic River in Connecticut’s Northwest Hills. Further upstream, against a backdrop of foggy woodlands and steep hills, a long covered bridge faithfully spans the frigid gorge.
At more than 170 feet in length, the West Cornwall Covered Bridge is arguably the most impressive bridge of its type left in Connecticut. Given the cost of maintenance and increasingly heavier loads it was forced to endure since the mid-1800s, it’s nothing short of a miracle that the bridge has survived to the present day.
There were low points along the way, of course. In 1945, a tanker truck broke through the bridge floor and crashed into the river below. A couple decades later in the late 60s, state officials contemplated tearing it down, but were met with vehement opposition from the surrounding community. Instead, it was reinforced with carefully-hidden steel underpinnings, ensuring the bridge would stick around for several more generations to come. The project was a marvelous success, even earning Connecticut an award from the Federal Highway Administration for exemplary historic preservation.
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Potent remnants of classic New England are few and far between these days. Thousands of fields abandoned a century ago have returned to a natural state, bristling with woodlands where once there were croplands or rolling pastures. Mills that once clustered along the banks of streams in each village –grinding grain, cutting lumber, producing cider– have all vanished, along with a great deal of the dams and water wheels that animated their machinery. When it comes to covered bridges, there are still a few vestiges of the old days that remain, and these enduring icons of early infrastructure are the focus of my newest fine arts prints.
My collection, Old Timbered Crossings, is a series of three newly-released works, each featuring one of Connecticut’s authentic, historic covered bridges. From the moment I began considering this project, I knew that each bridge needed to be represented in a way that uniquely conveyed its character. I wanted to illuminate the rustic beauty that inspired 20th-century folks to take up the role of advocate and steward and push for these relics to be preserved and protected, even as the pressures of the modern world seemed to preclude their continued existence.
Roughly a year elapsed between the moment that I first began to consider the concept of Old Timbered Crossings to the winter day below Bull’s Bridge during which I completed the series. In that time, my interest in these bridges naturally grew deeper. I wasn’t only interested in their weathered siding and rural surroundings, but also in the culture and the long-lost way of life from which these resourceful structures emerged. These bridges, I discovered, are so much more than just old timbered crossings. For those that are receptive to their story, they are rare portals into a bygone era of New England. They serve as windows into the past, inviting us to reflect upon times when culture and daily life was simpler and more relaxed, but also toilsome and oftentimes unforgiving.
These covered bridges embody core elements of New England life: beauty, ingenuity and hardship. So although they may have outlived their era of functional relevance, they have emerged in modern times with a more enduring role, standing as potent reminders of who we are amidst a world in which it is so easy to lose ourselves.
A Look Back: Covered Bridges in Old Connecticut
Throughout most of the 1800s, covered bridges played an absolutely critical role in American transportation. Rivers needed to be crossed in order to haul goods to neighboring towns, get to church on Sunday or simply to travel from place to place for business, school and leisure. And in an era when durable metal components weren’t an option, the only way to make a long-lasting wooden bridge was to fit it with a roof to protect its structural timbers from the elements. So at any given time during the 1800s, there were untold dozens of covered bridges that dotted the state, spanning all manner of waterway from obscure brooks to the vast Connecticut River.
Although there may have been earlier examples, the first documented covered bridge in Connecticut was built in 1817 and spanned the Shetucket River between Norwich and Preston. It was washed away by spring floods just six years later, a scenario that would prove to be all too common for the roughly century-long reign of the covered bridge.
Only three of Connecticut’s authentic, 19th-century covered bridges have stayed with us into modern times. The West Cornwall Covered Bridge, built in the 1860s in Cornwall, and Bull’s Bridge, built in 1841 in Kent, both span the Housatonic River as it snakes through Connecticut’s Northwest Hills. Comstock Covered Bridge, built in 1873 over the Salmon River in East Hampton, is the last covered bridge in the eastern half of the state.
It’s only natural that we might wonder what ever became of the covered bridges that were once common sights throughout Connecticut. Why are there only three left if once there were several dozen? Even though some simply grew old and were decommissioned, their failures were oftentimes more spectacular. Two centuries worth of records seem to reveal that bridges most often succumbed to the very rivers and streams they spanned, being washed away during spring floods. Others were destroyed by ice dams, succumbed to fire or were ruined when mill dams broke upstream. It was not uncommon that a given bridge might be destroyed multiple times over just a decade or two, each time being rebuilt out of necessity. Not only was this quite costly, but these bridge failures also served to severely disrupt local travel. For about a century, though, the perennial hardship of covered bridge maintenance was simply accepted as a reality of New England life. The more advanced designs for covered bridges were even hailed as marvels of engineering.
All of that began to change in the mid-1800s as the burgeoning railroad system sought to cross Connecticut’s many rivers. Covered bridges simply couldn’t bear the enormous weight of locomotives and designers responded by engineering the first iron bridges, which offered significantly greater strength and durability than wood. Such bridges were initially too expensive for anything besides railroad projects, but it didn’t take long for more affordable designs to hit the market. All over the state, as wooden covered bridges built in the earlier half of 1800s collapsed or grew older and became unsafe, they were commonly supplanted by iron bridges that offered a greater carrying capacity and a much longer lifespan. By the 1870s, it was becoming increasingly rare for towns to invest in building new covered bridges in all but the most rural areas.
By the 1920s, Connecticut’s population had grown larger than ever and, with the ever-increasing ubiquity of the automobile, people were travelling much more frequently. New wooden bridges were no longer being constructed and the increased strain on infrastructure proved to be the final straw for many that had somehow managed to hold up into the 20th-century. What few covered bridges were left around this time would all mostly be gone within a couple decades. In some cases, collapsed or dilapidated bridges were not replaced, but simply decommissioned once and for all with traffic being forever re-routed to newer bridges nearby. Bridges that had carried traffic for two or three generations were suddenly erased from the map so thoroughly that, in modern times, you would never even know they had once stood there.
So while we may think of these rustic covered bridges as romantic anachronisms, the fact of the matter is that most Connecticut towns were probably quite relieved when, one by one, all of their high maintenance wooden bridges were replaced with considerably more durable structures. Even their aesthetics were often unappreciated; one Highway Engineer from Oregon wrote in a 1914 report that wooden covered bridges had many benefits, but listed among their downfalls that they “do not present a pleasing appearance”. In Connecticut, it wasn’t until mid-century that folks began to realize the swiftness with which covered bridges had all but vanished from the landscape. During the 1940s and 50s, for example, many older folks could probably still remember a time when their home towns relied upon covered bridges; their grandchildren, on the other hand, would already have thought of those wooden structures as novel antiques.
As part of J. G. Coleman’s Decor Series prints, all of the works seen here are available at Pixels.com. You are encouraged to visit J. G. Coleman’s Pixels Art Store, or see all of Fine Art America’s covered bridge art.
