Worrall Covered Bridge Bartonsville
— — a wooden room you drive through.
Not only on a wall.
“A short town-lattice span over the Williams River, just off Route 103 in the Bartonsville section of Rockingham. Built in 1868 by Sanford Granger and listed on the National Register, it carries a single lane of local traffic between hayfields. In late afternoon the inside of the bridge holds the river light, slatted through the lattice as you pass. from the studio
Worrall Covered Bridge Bartonsville, 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.
Worrall Covered Bridge crosses the Williams River in the Bartonsville section of Rockingham, in Windham County, southern Vermont. It was built in 1868 by Sanford Granger, a local carpenter, using the town-lattice truss patented by Ithiel Town in 1820. The span is roughly 82 feet, single-lane, with a clearance posted at the deck. Route 103 runs the valley a short walk to the south, and the better-known Bartonsville Covered Bridge sits less than a mile upstream. Worrall was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and remains in active use on Williams Road.
The bridge is wood, not stone, but the structural story is the lattice itself. Ithiel Town patented the town-lattice truss in 1820 as a way for ordinary carpenters to build long spans without the heavy timber joinery of earlier kingpost and Burr-arch designs. The lattice is a dense diagonal grid of planks pinned with wooden trunnels, distributing load across many small members rather than a few large ones. Vermont kept building town-lattice bridges into the late 19th century long after iron had taken over elsewhere, and Worrall, raised in 1868 by Sanford Granger, is a clean example of the form, still carrying local traffic over the Williams River.
The bridge sits on Williams Road, a short turn off Vermont Route 103 between Chester and Bellows Falls. Parking is informal on the shoulder; the bridge itself remains open to single-lane vehicle traffic, so visitors usually pull off, walk through, and photograph from the riverbank. There is no fee and no posted hours. The Williams River drops through ledges just downstream and runs higher and louder after April thaw or an August storm. The Bartonsville Covered Bridge, rebuilt in 2012 after Tropical Storm Irene washed the 1870 original away, sits less than a mile upstream and is worth pairing with the walk.