The Walls Are the Bridge: Clarendon’s Kingsley Covered Bridge and How to Spot a Real One
Stand inside the Kingsley Covered Bridge in East Clarendon on a clear late afternoon and the walls come alive. The sun comes in low and directly from the side, and a crisscross web of heavy planks throws a pattern of light and shadow across the deck. It looks like decoration. It isn’t. Those crossed planks are the bridge itself, and that difference is exactly what separates a genuine covered bridge from a roofed look-alike.
Covered bridge enthusiasts have a simple test for authenticity, and it has nothing to do with age or red paint. The question is what carries the load. The Federal Highway Administration’s Covered Bridge Manual describes an authentic covered bridge as a structure that “earns its keep,” one that is “as it appears to be.” In a real covered bridge, timber trusses running the length of the span hold up the roadway, and the roof and siding are there to protect that timber. Put a barn-style shell over a steel beam or a concrete deck and you have something that looks like a covered bridge, but the manual says bridges like that are not generally considered legitimate covered bridge structures. The wood is only a costume.
That protection is the whole reason the old builders put roofs on bridges in the first place. As Vermont’s state historic sites program puts it, the primary purpose of the roof is to protect the structural timbers from the ravages of weather. Keep the trusses dry and a wooden bridge can carry a town’s traffic for generations.
Builders found several ways to span a river with wood, and each truss type leaves its own fingerprint. The kingpost, the most elementary form, is a single triangle built around one central post, suited to short crossings. The queenpost stretches that idea by adding a central panel for a longer reach. The Burr arch combines a multiple kingpost truss with a great curved timber arch. William Howe’s 1840 patents brought iron rods into the design as vertical members, and Colonel Stephen Long’s 1830 truss used crossed diagonals and timber wedges to adjust the load. Regional variations such as the Paddleford truss added their own twists. Learn to recognize these patterns and every covered bridge becomes a little easier to read.
The Kingsley bridge uses the design that many consider the most important of them all: the Town lattice. Architect Ithiel Town received his first patent for it in 1820, and his idea was a radical simplification. Instead of massive hewn timbers, the Town lattice uses relatively short, light planks that overlap in a dense diagonal crisscross between top and bottom chords, fastened at the intersections with wooden pegs called treenails. There are no big vertical posts. The lattice is the truss, and the truss is the wall. Town designed it to be built with less skilled labor and to stretch across a wide range of spans with little modification, and the Federal Highway Administration calls it arguably the most important development in the history of covered bridges.
The Kingsley Covered Bridge carries East Street over the Mill River, a short distance downstream from the falls and the Kingsley Grist Mill. Built around 1870, its single 121-foot span is held up by two Town lattice trusses, and light guy wires run from its corners down to the riverbanks to brace it against sideways forces. It is the only covered bridge left in the town of Clarendon.
The bridge shares its name with its neighbor. The state historical marker at the Kingsley Grist Mill calls it the last of a dozen mills that once dotted the Mill River. Kingsley’s Mill served Vermont’s grain needs from 1882 until 1935, in a mill designed and built by Nichols M. Powers of Clarendon, a nationally known Vermont covered bridge builder. It is fitting that a bridge builder’s mill and a lattice bridge have spent well over a century side by side on the same stretch of river.
The bridge has needed care to stay honest. It was restored and reopened in 1987, and after a major rehabilitation it reopened to traffic on July 25, 2024, with a community celebration organized by the Vermont Covered Bridge Society. Through it all, the lattice trusses remain the heart of the structure.
I photographed the Kingsley bridge from the inside, in the late afternoon. That is the hour when the sunlight hits the bridge directly from the side and lights up the lattice, so every plank and every crossing throws its own shadow. Most photos of covered bridges show the outside: the siding, the portal, the river. I wanted the part that makes this one real. In that raking light you can read the structure almost like a diagram and see that the walls are not a barn-like covering hung on the bridge. They are the bridge.
That late-afternoon lattice is now on the Clarendon, Vermont Photo T-Shirt in our Travel Design, a picture of how a real covered bridge works for anyone who has ever slowed down to look up inside one. Browse more Clarendon designs on the town page, and if you want to learn to spot the truss types yourself, the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges has a guide worth bookmarking.
🛒 Clarendon Vermont Photo T-Shirt, Travel Design
🌉 Covered bridge truss types, National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges
