Former Salmond Covered Bridge Site
Weathersfield, Windsor County, Vermont
Marker Inscription
A ONE SPAN, 54-FOOT MULTIPLE KINGPOST BRIDGE BUILT IN 1870'S BY JAMES TASKER RELOCATED IN 1959
The Story
This spot in Weathersfield marks where a 54-foot single-span covered bridge once stood, a multiple-kingpost design built in the 1870s and attributed to James Tasker, one of the Connecticut River valley's prolific self-taught bridge wrights. The structure was relocated in 1959, a common fate for aging wooden bridges as automobile traffic outgrew them. Vermont's covered bridges were as much practical engineering as folk craft, their roofs built to protect the timber trusses from rot.
Why it matters
Covered bridges are among New England's most beloved surviving artifacts of 19th-century rural engineering, and builders like Tasker turned a practical problem into an enduring regional icon.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the decades after the Civil War — the years of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age — rural Vermont lived by its rivers and the roads that crossed them. The Connecticut River valley was a working landscape of farms, mills, and small towns, all stitched together by the humble necessity of getting a wagon, a team, and a load safely to the other bank. A bridge was not scenery. It was commerce and connection.
Wood was the material at hand, and covered bridges were the practical answer to a hard problem: an exposed wooden truss rots, but a roofed one can stand for generations. The "covering" that makes these bridges so photogenic today was never about charm. It was a shelter for the structural timbers, protecting the trusses from rain and snow so the crossing would last.
This spot in Weathersfield marks where one such bridge once stood — a single span of about 54 feet, built in the 1870s. That places it squarely in the golden age of American covered-bridge building, when self-taught local wrights, working from experience and instinct as much as from any book, threw these roofed crossings over New England's streams.
People & events
The inscription attributes the bridge to James Tasker, and his name is worth pausing on. Builders like Tasker were the practical engineers of their valleys — craftsmen who mastered the geometry of a timber truss by doing it, again and again, rather than through formal schooling. In a region laced with rivers, a reliable bridgewright was a genuinely valuable neighbor.
The bridge itself was a "multiple kingpost" design. The kingpost is one of the oldest and most elegant truss forms: a triangle that carries a load by distributing it into compression and tension along its members. "Multiple" simply means the pattern was repeated to span a longer gap than a single triangle could manage. It is honest engineering you can almost read with the naked eye — a good design for a modest crossing like this 54-foot span.
Then the inscription notes a quieter event: the bridge was relocated in 1959. That single date carries a whole transition. By the mid-20th century, automobiles — heavier, faster, more numerous — had outgrown many of these narrow wooden crossings. Rather than demolish a sound old structure, communities sometimes moved them, and this bridge became one of those that was lifted from its original place and carried elsewhere.
Its place in the American story
Covered bridges are among the most beloved surviving artifacts of 19th-century rural America, and New England is their heartland. They speak to a moment when infrastructure was local, wooden, and built by hand — when the person who spanned your river might be someone you knew by name.
The story compressed into this marker — built in the 1870s, relocated in 1959 — is really the national story of these bridges in miniature. First the great era of building, when hundreds went up across the country's streams. Then the long reckoning with the automobile age, when many were lost to fire, flood, or the simple demand for wider, stronger roads, and a fortunate few were preserved by moving them out of harm's way.
That a community chose to relocate rather than raze this bridge says something about how Americans came to value them: not merely as crossings, but as heritage. The empty site here marks both the practicality that first raised the span and the affection that later refused to let it simply disappear.
If you visit
Understand first that this is a former site — the bridge no longer stands here; it was relocated in 1959. So come not to cross it but to read a landscape. Look at the stream and the banks and picture the problem a 19th-century builder faced: how to get a loaded wagon over that water and keep the structure standing for decades.
Let the setting do its work. Weathersfield is Connecticut River valley country, the kind of rural Vermont where the relationship between water, road, and settlement is still legible. Standing at the old crossing, you can appreciate why someone once put a roofed bridge exactly here.
If you love these structures, treat this as one stop on a broader Vermont covered-bridge route; the state is rich with surviving examples you can still walk through, and this marker adds the poignant note of one that had to move on. Bring your curiosity about how things are built — a multiple-kingpost truss is a small lesson in engineering hiding in plain sight — and enjoy the quiet of a spot that once hummed with the everyday traffic of a working valley.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · James Tasker
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