Woodstock

I stopped in Woodstock right after the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller park just up the road — that whole conservation story lives in its own entry. The town itself is tiny, even smaller than Stowe, and almost defiantly walkable: everything sits within a ten-minute stroll, gathered around an elm-shaded green and a few blocks of brick storefronts on Route 4. I picked up a maple-and-chokeberry creemee from Woodstock Scoops and just wandered.

The one place I wanted to step inside and couldn't was the Norman Williams Public Library — I had ice cream in hand, so I admired it from the steps instead. It's a wonderful old Richardsonian Romanesque pile of Vermont redstone and granite, built in 1883–84 as a gift to the town, with three deep-set arches and "ANNO DOMINI" carved across the gable. Even from the doorway it radiated that classic, history-soaked, warm-hearted small-library feeling.

What Woodstock is really full of, though, is covered bridges — and the plaques bolted to them are half the fun. Right in the center of town, the Middle Bridge carries the road over the Ottauquechee River on a wooden Town lattice truss, pegged together with some 1,400 wooden trunnels and not a scrap of structural steel. It's younger than it looks: Milton Graton and his sons built it in 1969 — the first authentic highway covered bridge raised in either Vermont or New Hampshire since 1895 — assembling it on Union Street and floating it across the river on cribwork. Vandals set it ablaze on the night of the 1974 Firemen's Ball, and it was painstakingly rebuilt. A few miles east, the barn-red Taftsville Bridge is the opposite story: put up in 1836 by a local named Solomon Emmons III, using an unusual truss of his own devising that copied no patent at all. At nearly 190 feet it's one of the oldest and longest covered bridges in Vermont, and it too was rebuilt after Tropical Storm Irene tore out its abutment in 2011. Keep going toward Quechee and there's a third. Three bridges, raised more than a century apart, all still carrying traffic today.