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OUR PEOPLE, OUR COMMUNITIES, OUR STORIES
VOLUME 1, ISSUE 4
Maple Glaze for Salmon Fillets
Canada’s Most Active Community
5
6
Recognizing Riverview Honourees
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A bright future for covered bridges
A
t the turn of 20th Century there were a thousand covered bridges in New Brunswick. Today there are fifty-nine; most although not quite all are still in operation. Nine of those are in Albert County and a tenth, the Hasty Bridge, is on the outskirts of Salisbury. Says Ray Boucher of Riverview, president of the Covered Bridges Conservation Association of New Brunswick, “some were lost to arson or disaster, but also governments back then had a policy that as covered bridges wore out (the government) would replace them with steel and concrete bridges. “At the time nobody was putting up any fight for them, so the bridges were pretty much torn down. There was nobody working for the province who understood what a covered bridge was and how it worked. There were not any timber bridge people.” Boucher recounts the story of one bridge that was considered too far gone to be saved. It came loose from its moorings and sailed twenty miles downriver. When it did run aground “a crew had to be brought into break it up. You tell me how a supposedly broken down, sixty-five foot bridge can float twenty miles and not break up! It could have
been repaired, I think. “There’s no reason why those bridges could not have been looked after better.” The covered bridge began in the age of human transport and the horse and buggy and has survived into the present day, the age of the automobile. Of the ten that remain in Albert County and Salisbury, says Boucher, there are two that need to be restored or repaired – one is on the Midway Road and the other is on the Mitton Farm Road in Riverview, which is in sufficiently poor repair to be out of commission. The conservation association sees bright spots and a steadily reversing trend away from replacing timber bridges and toward Continued on page 3 Forty Five River Bridge
Higgs Brook Bridge
Bramford Colpitts Bridge