Covered bridges are signature
— — a wooden room the road passes through.
Not only on a wall.
“More than a hundred covered bridges still stand in Vermont, more per square mile than anywhere else in the country. They are working bridges, not museum pieces. The roof was always practical: shelter the deck and the trusses last a century longer. The colour of the planks shifts with the river underneath, and the light coming through the portal arrives soft, already filtered by wood. from the studio
Covered bridges are signature, 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.
Vermont counts roughly 100 historic covered bridges in regular survey, the densest concentration of any U.S. state. Most were built between 1820 and 1900 using town lattice, Howe, or Burr arch trusses, the long roof shielding the wooden structure from rain and snow. The Pulp Mill Bridge at Middlebury still carries vehicles on a two-lane double-barrel deck, and the Cornish-Windsor Bridge across the Connecticut River, at 449 feet, is the longest two-span covered wooden bridge still standing in the country.
The trusses are almost always native softwood, hemlock or pine cut within a few miles of the abutments. The abutments themselves are dry-laid stone, sometimes mortared in later repairs, and they sit directly on the river bedrock. Restoration practice in Vermont, codified by the state's covered-bridge committee since the 1970s, favours replacement in kind: same species, same joinery, same span ratios. Steel stringers are tucked beneath the deck only where modern load ratings demand it, kept invisible from the river.
Most of the surviving bridges sit on town-maintained back roads, free to drive or walk through, posted with weight limits in the three- to six-ton range. The Taftsville Bridge near Woodstock, dating to 1836, is one of the oldest still in service. The cluster around Montgomery, in Franklin County, includes six bridges within a short loop, all on dirt roads, all open to passenger cars in summer and to walkers year-round.