Mount Orne Covered Bridge

The Mount Orne Covered Bridge in Lunenburg has been spanning the Connecticut River since 1911 — connecting Vermont to New Hampshire at a point where the river runs wide and cold through the Northeast Kingdom. At 266 feet, it’s one of the longest covered wooden bridges in New England, and one of only a handful in the entire country that serves as an actual border crossing between two states. [verify: length and date]

Stand inside it and you feel the engineering. The Pratt truss design distributes the load across the span using a framework of diagonal and vertical wooden members — no steel, no concrete, just an understanding of wood under stress that has held for over a century. The bridge is still standing, still crossing, still open.

Lunenburg was chartered in 1763, and for most of its history the Connecticut River wasn’t a boundary so much as a road. Timber came down it. Goods moved across it. The communities on both banks knew each other as the same valley long before they were different states. The covered bridge at Mount Orne was built to make that connection permanent.

This image of the bridge — shot from inside, looking out through the tunnel toward the Vermont hills beyond — is now on a shirt.

Lunenburg Travel Design shirt: https://shop.myhometownvermont.com/…/lunenburg-vermont…

Shop all Lunenburg products: https://myhometownvermont.com/towns/lunenburg/