A Sentimental Time Machine: Old Picture Postcards and Old Covered Bridges

1903

Most covered bridges in the east come to us from the nineteenth century. Even in the early part of the century, they already were beginning to seem quaint, and tourist interest in covered bridges seems to date back close to the turn of the century. We can know that because we find them portrayed on old picture post cards.

Picture postcards, unlike covered bridges, are pretty much a twentieth-century phenomenon. But throughout the twentieth century, they have appealed especially to tourists and travelers, and for that reason they give us a record of the sentimentality and nostalgia attached to the things they portray. We see covered bridges on some of the earliest.

The scene at the head of this page illustrates several points about old picture postcards of covered bridges. It is from a postcard postmarked Aug. 1903. Here are full views of the two sides of it:

The Amoskeag Falls Postcard

"Private Mailing Cards," as the front says, were authorized just before the turn of the century. One side was reserved for the address, so space must be left on the picture side for a message. We see that the view, in this case, is rather small. (At the top of this page it has been enhanced by the magic of 1990's electronics!)

The story told by the card is rather sad. Evidently, "G," Gertrude Gallagher, has not responded to an earlier message. The writer has faith that she would have written, had it reached her -- and, indeed, this card has been forwarded from Hillsborough to Moncton. Perhaps it reached Gertrude at last, and she, ignoring the note of self-pitying petulance, got in touch with A. W. -- and kept his message sentimentally in her things to come to a postcard sale 90 years later! We may hope so, reflecting that, had she thrown the card away, it most likely would not have survived to reach us.

Early in the century, covered bridges were not limited to the small streams and local areas. The Amoskeag Falls view illustrates that: this was a major bridge on a major stream. Here is one that illustrates the point even better. It is the Theodore Burr Camelback, at Harrisburg, Pa., here shown it a picture that was old when the card was issued. This bridge was destroyed by a flood in 1902.

Before 1902

But even if the covered bridges of 1915 could be urban ones, pictured more to testify to the engineering prowess of a community than to its rustic scenery, rural scenes with covered bridges decorated many postcards. Often these would have been breath-taking without the hand of man in the form of a wooden bridge. Consider, for example, this view of Runnel's Bridge, at Nashua, N. H. before 1912, which seems to have disappeared by the time Allen's "Covered Bridges of the Northeast" appeared in 1974.

1912

Or, in the same vein, we have this picture of Bishop's Falls in New York, commemorating a bridge destroyed in 1910. The card is postmarked 1912. The message on it tells of a shopping trip to "the town."

1910

All the same, it would be wrong to suggest that the simple rustic charm of the bridges themselves was lost on the first decade of the century. There are rustic scenes that quite early caught the imagination of postcard artists and are pictured again and again. Dorr Bridge is one. Near Rutland early in the century, it, too, seems no longer to exist.

1909

Similarly, this very early postcard shows a North Woodstock view. The card is postmarked August, 1905 and bears no message, perhaps because the blank space on the picture side is only 1/2 inch!

1905

Other images were even more rustic, such as Broad Brook Bridge, south of Brattleboro, Vt., and also no longer in existence:

1909

Close to home we find Berkeley Bridge, in the Northern Suburbs of Reading, Pa. It resembles the Dreiblebis Station Bridge, also on Maiden Creek, which still stands; but Berkeley is downstream and there is no covered bridge at Berkeley now. This card can only be dated as pre-World War I. It was made in Germany, and this import trade stopped with World War I. But the card was never postmarked. There is a message on the back -- it says that the sender is "still looking for new music," and expresses concern for loved ones, and is signed "Mom" -- but either it was never sent, or it was sent in an envelope, for it was never postmarked. We wonder, and will never know, if Mom found new music and if her Louellen got the message.

Prewar

But not all are gone, today. Here is a view of the Windsor-Cornish Bridge in Vermont and New Hampshire.

1908

It still stands today, the last inter-state bridge, one of the last of the big wooden bridges on a major river (the Connecticut).

Today

The card above is postmarked August, 1908, and in the message A. E. H. tells Cora that they had a lovely time on "the climb," twits Cora a little on her having changed her mind and not come, and recalls some earlier fine times they have had.

Those times are past, cherished memories perhaps, or less than that. But the bridge still stands, to recall them, like our other veteran covered bridges. The mountain will stand when the bridge, too, is gone, gone with the fine times that Cora and A. E. H. had sometime before the summer of 1908. Gone, but not quite forgotten. Never forgotten.