History: Connecticut River Byway

A Deep Sense of Place

When visitors to the Northern Connecticut River say they feel like they've come home, it's because our valley evokes the way things used to be. Early on a summer morning, as the mist rises off the water, it's possible to picture the river as indigenous people experienced it thousands of years ago. And many of our downtowns and villages survive intact from the 19th century, when the classic American Main Street was invented.

Here, the natural and built environments are balanced on a human scale, like the covered bridges that span the Connecticut and its tributaries. These and other historic bridges have tamed the topography in our water-shaped landscape, linking town and country.

In rural farming villages and urban commercial centers, our distinctive regional architecture tells a 250-year-old tale of settlement, growth, and changes in technology and fashion. You can read the story in the additions to a barn, in the layers of growth where a waterfall’s power spawned a small city, or factories where inspired tinkerers invented the machine tool industry.

Some things are just a memory, like the great log drives on the river. But you can still stroll down streets where the buildings have hardly changed in more than a hundred years, where the past and present persist together.

Historical Museums

The Connecticut River Valley is famous for its machine tool factories and their invention of what is known as "precision manufacturing." The most notable was the Robbins and Lawrence Armory and Machine Shop, in Windsor, VT. In the mid-1800s, the company was an innovator in the new field of manufacturing interchangeable parts, stimulating the growth of mass production and accelerating the industrial revolution. Its large brick factory, built in 1846, is now a National Historic Landmark and the home of the American Precision Museum. The Museum preserves the heritage of the mechanical arts, celebrates the ingenuity of our talented forebears, and explores the effects of their work on our everyday lives. It holds the largest collection of historically significant machine tools in the nation.

The Springfield (VT) Telescope Makers keep alive the traditions established at the Stellafane Observatory, also a National Historic Landmark. The Observatory played a pioneering role in amateur telescope making and popular astronomy in the United States. The site contains the group’s original clubhouse (1924), and the first large optical telescope (1930) built and owned by this kind of amateur society. Both clubhouse and telescope have remained in continuous use, preserved essentially in their original condition. Annual conventions attract thousands of amateur telescope makers and astronomers from many countries.

An architectural gem of the Byway region is the Rockingham Meeting House, a National Historic Landmark just off Route 103 in Rockingham, VT. A rare 18th century New England meeting house of the "second period" type, it is virtually unaltered on the exterior or interior. Its overall shape evokes Medieval timber frames and Puritan ideals, but it also includes Georgian-style details that are unmatched among surviving New England meeting houses of its time. It survives from the period when Church and State were combined, and European immigrants built, at public expense, structures employed for both religious and civic purposes. The Meeting House is open from May-October.

The Fort at No. 4 Living History Museum in Charlestown, NH, offers a glimpse of what life was like when the Northern Valley was a frontier in the mid-1700s. Sited on the banks of the Connecticut River, the Fort recreates and interprets the first permanent Euro-American settlement in the upper Connecticut River Valley, in 1744. Originally a log enclosure surrounding a number of dwellings at Charlestown's present-day village center, the fort is now represented by a reconstructed log museum at the nearby site of a Contact Period Abenaki village. In addition to its exhibits, the Fort has maintained a busy calendar of re-enactments and programs. The Fort will be closed in spring and summer, 2009 but plans to reopen in the fall.

Enfield Shaker Museum in Enfield, NH is a year-round center for history and outdoor recreation, with a mission to protect, enhance and utilize its eight historical structures, landscape and Shaker cultural heritage. The Museum offers daily tours of the 1841 Great Stone Dwelling, a significant architectural achievement. Depending on the weather, visitors may also enjoy self-guided tours of the other buildings and hiking trails in partnership with NH Fish & Game. A variety of programs for people of all ages are also offered year-round, including festivals, concerts, workshops, Shaker inspired dinners, hands-on activities for children, special events, and overnight programs with different themes.

It’s fitting that the only national park in America celebrating conservation history is set in the Northern Connecticut River Valley. The Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Woodstock, VT, honors George Perkins Marsh, one of the nation's first global environmental thinkers, and Frederick Billings, an early conservationist who established a progressive dairy farm and professionally managed forest on the former Marsh farm. Billings's granddaughter, Mary French Rockefeller, and her husband, conservationist Laurance S. Rockefeller, sustained Billings's practices in forestry and farming on the property over the latter half of the 20th century. The Billings Farm & Museum at the site continues the farm's working dairy and interprets rural Vermont life and agricultural history. The Park tells this many-layered story with tours of the mansion, farmhouse, and their surrounding 550-acre forest.

The President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth Notch, VT, is both a National Historic Landmark and Vermont Historic Site. The 30th president of the U.S. was born here on the Fourth of July, 1872, in the house attached to his father's general store. In 1876 the family moved across the way and it was here in 1923 that Coolidge was sworn in as president by his father, a notary public, after receiving word of President Harding's death. The president and seven generations of the Coolidge family are buried here in Plymouth Notch, a pristine example of an early 20th century Vermont hill town. It has been called the best preserved presidential birthplace in the nation.

A carefully restored Gothic Revival-style house commemorates a Vermonter who left school at the age of 15, but later opened the door to higher education to millions of Americans. The Justin S. Morrill Homestead, in Strafford, VT, is both a National Historic Landmark and Vermont Historic Site. As U.S. Congressman and later Senator, Morrill was responsible for the acts establishing the Land Grant Colleges, the forerunners of many state universities. He designed and constructed the 17-room house in 1848-51, as well as gardens, barns and outbuildings reflecting his interest in architecture and landscape. The house is furnished with original Morrill family possessions.

The Salmon P. Chase Birthplace honors a man who served in all three branches of the Federal Government and lived here for the first eight years of his life. Before the Civil War, As a U.S. Senator, he fought to end slavery, before serving as Secretary of the Treasury. In 1864 President Abraham Lincoln appointed him Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Less than six months later Chase administered the Presidential oath of office to Andrew Johnson, and in 1868 presided over the Johnson impeachment trial. The National Historic Landmark, located on Route 12A in Cornish, NH, is now operated as a bed-and-breakfast inn, and hosted Vice President Al Gore in 1999 when he came to celebrate the designation of the Connecticut River as an American Heritage River.

The Poore Family Homestead in Stewartstown, NH illustrates the inventive and physically demanding way of life that existed prior to rural electrification. The protected 100-acre property displays the 1826 homestead, barns, furnishings, and tools of this early hill farm, reflecting the traditional spirit, values, and way of life of settlers of the Connecticut River Valley headwaters. The large barn, with its impressive high drive, shelters displays of original farm machinery and household necessaries used by generations of the Poore family: a full loom, spinning wheels, the original hay wagon carriages, and sleighs, farm tools, games, clothing, medicines, journals, and Civil War-era letters. Located near Beaver Brook Falls, the farm is open to the public during the summer.

For more on Vermont and New Hampshire history, visit the New Hampshire Historical Society and the Vermont Historical Society.

Historic Markers
State historic markers in the Byway region offer glimpses into an extraordinary array of people and events that have shaped our history. Some refer to tangible reminders like a covered bridge or venerable house. Others mark events that may have passed and left no trace. For the text and locations of state historic markers, visit the history sections of the Waypoint Communities' pages.

Covered Bridges

The Connecticut River slips under dozens of bridges in New Hampshire and Vermont that span architectural designs and periods as varied as the covered bridges of the 1800s and the "erector set" iron bridges of the early-mid 1900s to modern concrete crossings. To learn more about them, visit the Connecticut River Joint Commissions' heritage pages.

Of the region's many historic bridges, among the most cherished are its covered bridges. You can visit them here.

Spanning the Connecticut River (north to south):
Pittsburg-Clarksville, NH: Pittsburg-Clarksville Bridge
Columbia, NH – Lemington, VT: Columbia Covered Bridge
Lancaster NH- Lunenberg VT: Mount Orne Bridge
Cornish, NH – Windsor, VT: Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge

Within New Hampshire:
Bath: Bath Bridge and Bath-Haverhill Bridge, Ammonoosuc River
Bath: Swiftwater Bridge, Wild Ammonoosuc River
Cornish: Blacksmith Shop Bridge, and Dingleton Hill Bridge, Mill Brook
Cornish: Blow-Me-Down Bridge, Blow-Me-Down Brook
Langdon: McDermott Bridge, Cold River
Langdon: Prentiss Bridge, Great Brook
Lancaster: Mechanic Street Bridge, Israel's River
Lebanon: Packard Hill Bridge, Mascoma River
Lyme: Edgell Bridge, Clay Brook
Newport: Pier Bridge and Wright's Bridge, Sugar River
Newport: Corbin Bridge, Croyden Branch of the Sugar River
Northumberland: Groveton Bridge, Ammonoosuc River
Pittsburg: Happy Corner Bridge and River Road Bridge, Perry Stream
Plainfield: Meriden Bridge, Blood Brook
Stark: Stark Bridge, Upper Ammonoosuc River
Swanzey: Slate Bridge, West Swanzey Bridge and Sawyer's Crossing Bridge, Ashuelot River
Swanzey: Carleton Bridge, South Branch Ashuelot River
Winchester: Ashuelot Bridge and Coombs Bridge, Ashuelot River

Within Vermont:
Brattleboro: Creamery Bridge, Whetstone Brook
Dummerston: West Dummerston Bridge, West River
Guilford:Green River Bridge, Green River
Hartland: Martin's Mill Bridge, Lull's Brook
Hartland: Willard Bridge, Ottauquechee River
Lyndon: Chamberlin Bridge and Schoolhouse Bridge, South Branch Passumpsic River
Lyndon: Miller's Run Bridge, Miller's Run
Lyndon: Randall Bridge, East Branch of the Passumpsic River
Lyndon: Sanborn Bridge, Passumpsic River
Rockingham: Bartonsville Bridge and Worrals Bridge, Williams River
Rockingham: Hall Bridge, Saxtons River
Rockingham: Victorian Bridge
Springfield: Baltimore Bridge, unnamed brook
Thetford: Sayers Bridge and Union Village Bridge, Ompompanoosuc River
Weathersfield: Downers Bridge, Black River
Weathersfield: Salmond Bridge and Titcomb Bridge
West Windsor: Bests Bridge and Bowers Bridge, Mill Brook
Woodstock, Lincoln Bridge, Middle Bridge, and Taftsville Bridge, Ottauquechee River

Connecticut River Byway Council