Residents of Bennington refer to the center of the town as “The Village”. This was the original settlement of the town, where the houses and mills were located around 1800. The population moved into areas outside the Village as farms became established away from the river. But the river defined the town and the river needed a bridge.

When Joseph Putnam moved to Bennington and set up his water-powered saw mill, he built a wooden bridge across the Contoocook. Like the house of the Second Little Pig in the children’s story, wood is not the most suitable material for a bridge: either the water rots it or it is washed away in a flood.

Within 10 years of building his first bridge, Putnam solicited help from the Town of Hancock to build a new one. He made a deal to join his land on the right bank of the river with Hancock on the left bank. This done, the bridge would be the responsibility of Hancock’s citizens to pay for it. They dragged their feet for five years, and at last a wooden bridge with stone abutments was completed in 1799.

That bridge was destroyed by successive Spring floods in the 1880s. A special town meeting was gathered in 1886, “to see what kind of a bridge the town will vote to build…” They elected to buy a pre-fab iron bridge from the Berlin [Connecticut] Iron Bridge Company for $1559.31. It had a footbridge on the upstream side with a railing.

That bridge was still standing in the early 1930s. In 1935, in an effort to employ the millions of people impoverished by the Great Depression, the US government established the Works Progress Administration. The town applied to upgrade the bridge and the approaches to it, and in 1934, a new structure appeared: a single arch span of New Hampshire granite. The road and bridge surface were widened to accommodate cars and trucks. Houses were moved out of the way, as was the Bennington Railroad station.

The bridge is still in use, festooned with greenery in the winter and decked with flowering baskets in the summer. It does its job well.

The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on December 17, 2024. If you click the Subscribe button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month – for free.