Skip to main content

Mechanic Street Covered Bridge - Lancaster, New Hampshire

 


Nestled in the beautiful Great North Woods Region of New Hampshire's Coös County is the Mechanic Street Covered Bridge in the village of Lancaster, New Hampshire. The Mechanic Street Covered Bridge is located just east of US Route 2 and US Route 3, just past the downtown core of Lancaster. The bridge is also known as the Israels River Covered Bridge, owing to the name of the river that it crosses over. Using a Paddleford truss design that is common with many covered bridges in Northern New England, this bridge was built in 1862 at a length of 94 feet and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is also considered to be number 31 out of the 54 historic covered bridges that have been assigned an official number by the State of New Hampshire.

Shortly after the bridge's construction in 1862, the residents of Lancaster at the time instructed the town's selectmen to erect a sign board at each end of the bridge that prohibited driving (probably by horse and buggy or wagon at the time) across the bridge at a pace faster than a walk. This action is said to have contributed to the bridge's longevity. But like all bridges, the Mechanic Street Covered Bridge has needed repairs and reconstruction over the years. In 1962, Lancaster requested the State of New Hampshire to provide an estimated cost for rehabilitating the Mechanic Street Covered Bridge. The total cost of rehabilitation was estimated to be $18,000, of which $10,800 was to be the responsibility of the Town of Lancaster with the remainder to be furnished by the State of New Hampshire. The town took no action on this estimate at their annual town meeting that year, however, the abutments were repaired in 1967 by the State of New Hampshire. The bridge was closed from 2004 to 2006 to correct a number of safety issues that had mounted over the years. The repairs to the bridge cost about $750,000, with the New Hampshire Department of Transportation providing $600,000 with the town paying the rest of the money.

I think that a nice job was done on the restoration of this covered bridge. During a springtime trip to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and northern New Hampshire, I passed through Lancaster during my journey. I decided to check out the Mechanic Street Covered Bridge for myself and I find it to be a nice centerpiece for the town. Its idyllic location over the Israel River enhances the beauty of the covered bridge.









How to Get There:




Sources and Links:
Northern Gateway - Bridges of Coos County
Bridgehunter.com - Mechanic Street Covered Bridge 29-04-06
NHTourGuide.com - Mechanic Street Bridge Lancaster NH
New Hampshire Bridges - Mechanic Street Bridge
Vermont's Covered Bridges - Covered Bridge Community News Notes - 2006
Brad Prendergast Photography - New Hampshire Covered Bridge #31

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

  Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

Old River Lock & Control Structure (Lettsworth, LA)

  The Old River Control Structure (ORCS) and its connecting satellite facilities combine to form one of the most impressive flood control complexes in North America. Located along the west bank of the Mississippi River near the confluence with the Red River and Atchafalaya River nearby, this structure system was fundamentally made possible by the Flood Control Act of 1928 that was passed by the United States Congress in the aftermath of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 however a second, less obvious motivation influenced the construction here. The Mississippi River’s channel has gradually elongated and meandered in the area over the centuries, creating new oxbows and sandbars that made navigation of the river challenging and time-consuming through the steamboat era of the 1800s. This treacherous area of the river known as “Turnbull’s Bend” was where the mouth of the Red River was located that the upriver end of the bend and the Atchafalaya River, then effectively an outflow

California State Route 203 the proposed Minaret Summit Highway

California State Route 203 is an approximately nine-mile State Highway located near Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Mono County.  California State Route 203 as presently configured begins at US Route 395, passes through Mammoth Lakes and terminates at the Madera County line at Minaret Summit.  What is now California State Route 203 was added to the State Highway System in 1933 as Legislative Route Number 112.  The original Mammoth Lakes State Highway ended at Lake Mary near the site of Old Mammoth and was renumbered to California State Route 203 in 1964.  The modern alignment of the highway to Minaret Summit was adopted during 1967.   The corridor of Minaret Summit and Mammoth Pass have been subject to numerous proposed Trans-Sierra Highways.  The first corridor was proposed over Mammoth Pass following a Southern Pacific Railroad survey in 1901.  In 1931 a corridor between the Minarets Wilderness and High Sierra Peaks Wilderness was reserved by the Forest Service for po