Canton Historical Museum 2012 Winter Lecture: Covered Bridges of the Farmington Valley

In this first lecture of the Museum's 2012 Winter Lecture Series, William S. Caswell, Jr. of New Hampshire will discuss Covered Bridges in the Farmington Valley.

Although employed as a civil engineer at the New Hampshire Department of Transportation, early in that position he became interested in visiting the state’s covered bridges. Fascinated by the craftsmanship of those structures combined with a life-long interest in history set his future on a new path, and he has visited most of the standing covered bridges in the United States and Canada.

In 2002, noting the lack of information on the bridges of the past, he and a colleague initiated a research project to document the covered bridges of the US and Canada. His website presently documents over 13,000 wood truss bridges.

Using information from this project, he has just published a book entitled, Covered Bridges of Connecticut and Rhode Island which will be available at the lecture.

He is actively involved in a number of covered bridge organizations and serves as assistant historian and vice president of the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges (NSPCB). In 2009 he co-authored the seventh edition of that organization’s World Guide to Covered Bridges.