Historic tolls sign from circa 1900 at Connecticut River bridge - much sharper picture

Dec 2007 we wrote a speculative article about a picture of an historic "Tariff of Toll Rates" sign that was identified only in the Library of Congress collection as located at the Connecticut River between Vermont and New Hampshire. It was a faded overexposed black and white photograph.

We fiddled with it Photoshop and got it barely legible.

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/3305

Now a reader, John R Ellis has sent us a way better quality picture of the same sign than the Library of Congress picture - a color picture, much sharper. This one was underexposed but Photoshop's 'Brightness' adjustment helps compensate for that and we now have a nice clear picture of the sign (see nearby).

The sign itself is the same in the two pictures but the mounting poles to either side are different. The sign must have been remounted between the taking of the two pictures.

Ellis now an executive at Turn of Redwood City south of San Francisco says he found the picture among a large collection of slides shot by his late father. They were labelled September 1953. It was right after a slide taken in Stoddard NH.

He says his parents travelled often between Randolph VT, Stoddard NH, and Hartford, Connecticut:

"It’s entirely possible they passed this sign somewhere along the Connecticut River, for example at White River Junction."

The Connecticut River, 655km (407mi) long is the largest river in the US east of the Hudson River and flows from lakes in the far north of New Hampshire into the Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean in Old Saybrook CT.  The White River is a central Vermont tributary, and White River Junction, logically, is where the White and Connecticut rivers join.

The upper Connecticut River forms the boundary between Vermont and New Hampshire. The main north-south roads have tended to follow the west or Vermont side of the river as I-91 does today, we understand, but there were toll bridges up and down the river linking communities on both sides from colonial times.

White River Junction is at the complex of small settlements including Hartford VT, Wilder and Russtown VT and Hanover NH and Lebanon NH where I-89 and I-91 now cross

We guessed the sign was composed and in use at a toll bridge very early in the 20th century in the middle of a transition from animal drawn vehicles to the internal combustion engine. Maybe late 19th century?

Linguistic change

An intriguing linguistic sidelight. The term 'automobile' appears to have connoted any kind of motor vehicle since there is a class "automobiles, passengers seven or more" so an 'automobile' then could have been a bus.

Bridges were fragile affairs

We started to look at historical stuff on the web to see if we could get any further clues as to where this might have been. It's challenging because there were so many toll bridges, and we guess they came and went because many were fragile affairs. And just as now there were anti-toll politicians around then savaging tolling with populist "You can have it free" rhetoric.

Early toll bridges tended to be built by ferrymen, their charter to operate a ferry service being converted to a toll bridge charter or concession when the traffic warranted the investment in the bridge.  Or else an entrepreneur decided to build the toll bridge in competition with a ferryman.

The toll bridges were a classic business venture based on prospective traffic and willingness to pay, with a lot of risk from floods. Bridges regularly got swept away. Business judgments to be made about the trade-off between capital cost and flood resistance - through greater height and the solidity of piers. The superstructures being largely wooden they slowly rotted. Sometimes they burned.

Roofed or covered bridges were deployed in the northeast US to keep snow off the deck and reduce rotting, but they were more vulnerable to destruction by fire.

Toll bridges changed hands with mergers and acquisitions, sales of the business, and bankruptcies.

Sometimes towns would raise the money to "free" the bridge of tolls by buying out the toller.

Here's a couple of items that could be related:

"Ledyard Bridge -  Hanover to Norwich, Vermont. The first bridge at this location was built in 1796 by the White River Falls Bridge Company, and was the second bridge over the Connecticut River between New Hampshire and Vermont. The bridge of 1796, built by a local contractor on Timothy Palmer's design, fell of its own weight in 1804.

"The second bridge had two spans, but was not roofed. A third bridge was built here in 1839, also without a roof. It was destroyed by fire in August, 1854. The fourth bridge, the Ledyard Bridge, was built by the two towns at a total cost of $10,500. It opened in 1859 and was a free bridge. It was a two-span Town lattice truss, with a total length of 402 feet. According to Frank J. Barrett, Jr., surviving blueprints show that arches were added to the trusses in 1927.

"The bridge was taken down in the fall of 1934, occasioning the writing of at least two poetic laments by Dartmouth students, published in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.

"It was replaced by a three-span continuous deck plate girder bridge, having girders of variable section, in 1934-5. The steel bridge, in turn, was replaced in 1999 with a concrete span ornamented by large concrete spheres.

"West Lebanon Route 4 Bridge - West Lebanon to Hartford, Vermont. The Lyman Bridge Company maintained a wooden toll bridge here from 1802 until 1879. In 1879, the towns of Lebanon and Hartford paid a total of $4,557.98 to free the bridge. The wooden bridge was destroyed by flood in 1896.

"A new steel bridge was thereupon built by the two communities at a total cost of $40,766.04. Total length of this bridge was 427 feet. According to a Storrs photograph, the bridge was composed of one double-intersection Warren truss and one low Pratt truss. This bridge may have been built by the Berlin Iron Bridge Company; Berlin Bridges and Buildings (Vol. I, No. 7, October 1898) describes a bridge in Lebanon as a 'Pratt Truss Bridge consisting of three spans, two 141 ft. long and one 83 ft. long with a roadway 20 ft. wide and one 6 ft. walk.'

"The bridge at this crossing was destroyed by the flood of 1936.

"The present bridge between West Lebanon and Hartford on Route 4 is composed of two high Pratt spans and one low Warren span. It was built by the American Bridge Company in 1936."

from http://www.crjc.org/heritagebridges.htm#WLeb

We can't put it together. If anyone cares to research it further we'll report it as a follow-up.

Meanwhile thanks to Mr Ellis for the picture. He is contactable at john@johnrellis.com

Google turned up:

tolls on Connecticut River VR-NH:

http://www.vermontgenealogy.com/history/bridges_across_the_connecticut_river.htm

http://www.crjc.org/heritagebridges.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_River

(BREAKING NEWS: Al Almasy of ACS at E-ZPass CSC in Baltimore and formerly Toll Manager at New Hampshire DOT says the sign comes from the Cheshire Toll Bridge. It is located at Charlestown. We're following up -editor 2010-01-29 11:00)

TOLLROADSnews 2010-01-28