The Whittier Bridge of Ossipee, New Hampshire

This post serves two purposes. First, it demonstrates how easily my brain can be hijacked and sent careening down a rabbit hole for hours at a time. But it should also leave you feeling happy about yourself, happy you're not a local politician in the state of New Hampshire.

The story begins almost two weeks ago when New Jersey was hit by a magnitude 4.8 earthquake. While it was unnerving to those of us who experienced it, it caused minimal damage and quickly disappeared from the news cycle.Yesterday, though, the local paper decided to milk the story a bit more by running an exposé on the fact that typical homeowners insurance doesn't cover earthquake damage. Stop for a second and imagine you are the reporter tasked to write this story. How in God's name do you make the nuances of homeowner insurance interesting?  Well, hats off to the author, because he found a way to hook me. Since there were no seriously damaged houses to show, he led off his article with this picture:

This is the 264-year old Taylor Grist Mill located in Readington, NJ, with a portion of its front wall partially damaged by the earthquake. But if you expected this article to inform you about this mill's history, the extent of its damage and what it will take to restore it, you were sadly mistaken. It contained exactly one sentence about the mill, a perfect example of journalistic bait and switch.

No matter. I had the Internet at my fingertips and was off and running. I clicked on a bunch of websites and discovered all kinds of interesting things about the mill.  It supplied grain to the Continental Army during the American Revolution and continued to operate into the 20th century. It's on the National Register of Historic Places. It's part of the Taylor's Mill Historic District, and a bridge leading to it within the District was recently replaced in 2006.

Wait.  Hold on. What was that?

That last fact caused my trip down the rabbit hole to come to a screeching halt. I was suddenly reminded of another historic bridge under repair that my wife and I came across while bird-watching in New Hampshire. But where, exactly, was that bridge? When were we there? Did I take a picture of it? The rabbit hole continued, but it had veered onto a brand new path. After a painstaking search through my iPhone photos, I found the picture below, taken on September 1, 2022:

Close scrutiny of the sign at the top of the bridge revealed that it was located in Ossipee, New Hampshire. The game was once again afoot!

I learned that it is a type of bridge called a Paddleford truss bridge and that it was built in 1870 after a prior bridge had been washed off its abutments by a flood in 1869. It is named for the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who spent his summers in a hotel nearby. I learned that, at 132 feet, it is one of the longest covered bridges in New Hampshire and was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. 

But that's not all. I also learned that, a few months after I snapped my photo, the Whittier Bridge was moved back on its abutments and opened to pedestrian traffic only. No motorized vehicles of any kind are permitted on it. And then, unexpectedly, the rabbit hole hit rock bottom, landing upon the article below from the Conway Daily Sun. Once I read this story, I knew I was done, a fitting end to my quest.  

It's a JPG file (in case the original web page goes away), so you have to click on it to read. It's a tad long, but its insight into life as a local New Hampshire politician was  unexpected, somewhat amusing and, ultimately, stunning.