Brown Covered Bridge Shrewsbury
— — a long red room over running water.
Not only on a wall.
“Brown Bridge crosses the Cold River on a dirt road in the hills above Shrewsbury. It was built in 1880 by Nichols M. Powers, the Vermont covered-bridge builder, using a town lattice truss of overlapping wooden planks. The siding is painted barn red. The river below runs clear and fast over rounded river-stone. There are no signs on the approach. You come around a bend in the woods and the bridge is there, longer than you expect, holding still over the water. from the studio
Brown Covered Bridge Shrewsbury, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Brown Bridge carries Upper Cold River Road over the Cold River in the town of Shrewsbury, Rutland County, Vermont. The bridge was built in 1880 by Nichols Montgomery Powers, the Vermont builder responsible for some of the most ambitious covered bridges in New England. It uses a town lattice truss, the design patented by Ithiel Town in 1820, with overlapping wooden planks pinned by treenails. The span is about 36 metres long and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The bridge rests on dry-laid stone abutments quarried from the surrounding hillside, the same rounded river-stone the Cold River carries. The siding is vertical board, painted barn red, with a metal roof added in a later rehabilitation. Inside, the lattice work shows the pinned wooden construction Powers used on his other surviving Vermont bridges, including the Bartonsville and Worrall crossings. The Brown Bridge was rehabilitated in the early 1980s and again after Tropical Storm Irene reshaped the Cold River drainage in 2011.
The bridge is reached by Upper Cold River Road, a maintained dirt road off Vermont Route 103 in the village of Cuttingsville, about 18 kilometres southeast of Rutland. The road is open year round to passenger vehicles but is not plowed promptly after heavy snow. There is no parking lot and no signage announcing the crossing; the bridge appears at a bend in the woods. Visitors typically stop briefly, walk through, and continue on the road toward Shrewsbury Center.