Covered Bridges on Two Wheels

Cilley Bridge is located in Tunbridge, Vermont, home of 5 covered bridges. Named for the Cilley family that lived nearby, it has also been known as the Lower Bridge, being downstream from the Mill Bridge.

The write-up for this bridge is going to be brief (maybe mercifully so for you, the reader) because there is little history to report. The nearly 150 year-old bridge has had no major repairs that I can find, yet remains in remarkably great shape. Even the truss members seem to be hardly aged. 

This makes me wonder if there has been some kind of renovation to this bridge, the records of which cannot be found on the Web. But then again, it has been shown that a properly built covered bridge can last much longer than modern steel and concrete ones.

Photographs that I have seen that were taken circa 2004 show a bridge with much darker siding, so sometime after that date the siding appears to have been replaced and the abutments have been at least faced with concrete, if not rebuilt completely.

At one time, two guy wires were attached to the bridge under the eaves on the eastern end, and anchored to the ground, but these have been removed. The lack of these wires suggests that some kind of work may have been done to stabilize the bridge. Or maybe it was decided that they were not needed any longer.