The Town Bridge

Ithiel Town patented this bridge design in 1820. A New Haven-based pioneer in American architecture and engineering, he also designed Center Church and Trinity Church on New Haven's Green, built mansions on Hillhouse Avenue, and created important buildings across Connecticut, in Boston and New York City, and statehouses in North Carolina and Indiana. The bridge showed Town's practical side, and he asked Eli Whitney to comment on the novel timber truss design. Whitney endorsed its simplicity, lightness, strength, cheapness, and durability. Its trusses could span impressive distances without expensive mid-stream abutments, construction required workmen with basic joinery skills, the design needed no long timbers that were difficult to acquire, mill, transport, and handle, and the covering sheltered the structural timbers and reduced maintenance costs. Town sold bridge plans up and down the Atlantic coast for $2 per lineal foot of the finished bridge, earning an impressive return on the patent. In 1823, Whitney became the first to employ Town's patented design. That 1823 bridge crossed the Mill River here behind the original much smaller dam 400 yards north and aligned with the straight path of the Hartford Turnpike. In 1860, Eli Whitney's son built the much larger dam seen today, and because the 37-year-old Town Bridge remained in such good shape, he had it pulled north by oxen and rollers to carry the Hartford Turnpike across Davis Street. A flood damaged the old Town Bridge in 1890. In 1937, Frederic Oberlin designed a bridge suitable for automobile traffic. Students from Eli Whitney Technical School built this replica in 1979.

Hamden, Connecticut · United States