The Halpin Covered Bridge: Middlebury’s Hidden Span, 41 Feet Above the Muddy Branch
You can drive right up to the Halpin Covered Bridge and still not know what it is standing over. The road runs through ordinary Addison County farmland, the brush grows thick on both sides, and the bridge looks like any other old wooden span on a dead-end lane. It is only when you are a couple of feet from the portal that the ground drops away and you realize there is a gorge under there, and that the floor you are about to walk onto is 41 feet above the water.
That number, as well as the peaceful out-of-the-way location that lets visitors explore free from traffic, are among the reasons people come looking for this bridge. The Halpin Covered Bridge carries a short spur of road across the Muddy Branch of the New Haven River at the northern edge of Middlebury, and at 41 feet above the stream it sits higher than any other covered bridge in Vermont. Below it, the Muddy Branch spills over a natural waterfall at the bottom of the gorge. Bridge fans also know it by a plainer nickname: the High Covered Bridge.
The bridge itself is modest. It is a single span, 66 feet long, held up by two Town lattice trusses: a web of heavy planks crossed diagonally and pegged together, a design Connecticut architect Ithiel Town patented in 1820. Vertical boards close in the sides, there are no windows, and a gable roof keeps the weather off the trusses.
Nobody wrote down who built it, and even the year is debated. The Town of Middlebury dates the bridge to 1824, though some covered bridge historians think it may have gone up closer to 1840. Its original abutments were marble slabs laid dry, stacked without mortar on either bank of the gorge.
There is no through traffic now. Today the bridge leads only to the Halpin family farm, and the town still maintains it. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 10, 1974. By the 1990s the old marble abutments were crumbling, and in 1994 Jan Lewandoski lifted the bridge off them and set it down on new concrete abutments, which is why it is still carrying farm traffic over the gorge today.
There is one more thing that sets the Halpin apart, and it is the thing that stopped me when I first walked up to it: you cannot see the gorge until you are practically in it. The trees and brush crowd right up to the banks on both sides, so the drop stays hidden until the last few feet.
For this photo I set up on a tripod inside the bridge and made two exposures, one for the timber interior and one for the road outside, curving uphill and around the bend into a bright spring day. Blending them let me hold the detail in both places at once. That balance is the feeling every real covered bridge gives you, being inside and outside at the same time, and it is the feeling photographs almost never manage to keep. Standing in the Halpin, you are in the shade of the trusses and out in the open fields with a single step.
This image of the Halpin Covered Bridge is now on a Middlebury Signature Design shirt, a piece of Vermont’s highest covered bridge you can take home without having to find the gorge first.
