Jigsaw for November 14, 2026: The Bridge at Randolph, 1927
I started this week trying to pin down circus elephants in Vermont.
This led me by a circuitous route to the Randolph Historical Society. An enthusiastic veteran volunteer met me and had the pictures I had requested ready to scan. She also gave me a tour of their fascinating museum and gave me a link to the nearly 1,000 photos in their Flickr feed. When I saw the photo of the ruined bridge I remembered I had wanted to recognize the 99th anniversary of that widespread and overwhelming event of November 3rd and 4th, 1927. It rained for two days on ground already soaked by a wet October, and every river in the state rose at once. Eighty-four Vermonters died, among them the lieutenant governor, S. Hollister Jackson. The state counted more than 1,200 bridges destroyed or badly damaged.
These three pictures look across the Third Branch of the White River from Main Street in Randolph. The same two houses stand high on the hill behind all three.
At top is the Village Bridge, a covered bridge. The town voted $600 for it in 1846. It came down in 1924 to make room for a steel and concrete bridge, which opened to traffic about New Year’s 1925. On March 31, 1925, before it was finished, a spring freshet carried out the Morse mill dam just upstream and nearly took the new bridge with it. The dam was rebuilt and joined to the bridge’s south abutment by a masonry wing.
In the middle is that bridge after the flood. It was less than three years old. On Thursday evening, with a ten-foot sheet of water pouring over the dam, the river rose above the wing and washed out the earth behind it. About nine o’clock the dam and the south end of the bridge dropped into the stream together, taking the village water main with them. The bridge had cost $44,000 and, in the words of Vermont in Floodtime, published in Randolph the next spring, “was only partially paid for.”
At bottom is its replacement, opened October 27, 1928. Another card gives its length as 220 feet. The tall building that stood at the right end of the broken bridge is gone.
Randolph lost ten bridges in that flood, and the village $275,000. The Sargent, Osgood & Roundy factory below the dam, with about forty men, went into receivership at once.
November is a cruel month for a flood in Vermont. Winter is a few weeks off, and there is no time to rebuild before the ground freezes. In Randolph the electric lights were out from Thursday night until Sunday, and for a while the village’s water came through a fire hose. A breeches buoy, then a footbridge carrying a water pipe, crossed the gap; a temporary bridge at the Playground took traffic about two weeks later. Flour, sugar and gasoline were rationed. The railroad was out for three months, so the mail and everything else went by road over the hills to the railhead at White River Junction.
The 1928 bridge carried Main Street for seventy-nine years. A steel bridge of two 100-foot spans replaced it in 2007, and that is the one you drive over today.
How the later floods compare, bridge for bridge:
1927: more than 1,200 bridges destroyed or badly damaged, 84 dead.
March 1936: snowmelt and rain flooded the valleys, but no one kept a statewide count of Vermont bridges.
June 1973: 26 highway bridges washed out, plus railroad trestles.
August 2011, Tropical Storm Irene: about 200 state bridges and more than 280 town bridges damaged or destroyed, 6 dead, 13 towns cut off.
Irene came closest, with fewer than half as many.
More Upper Valley floods
A word of thanks
My thanks to Jessamyn West for the tour, and to the Randolph Historical Society, which shares its photographs on Flickr, free to use. The society runs on volunteers. If you live near Randolph and can give some time, or want to support their work, write to them at randolph.vt.history@gmail.com, and read more of their history on the society’s blog.
Full-resolution images
Thanks for your support, as always,
Cameron Cross
Sources
Photographs from the Randolph Historical Society, colorized by the author. Today’s bridge: Google Street View, September 2026.
Roy L. Johnson Co., Vermont in Floodtime (Randolph, 1928), pages 133-135, and its plate “Main Street Bridge, Randolph”
WCAX, “This day in history: devastating floods spur disaster response changes,” June 30, 2026
VTDigger, “Five years after Irene, Vermont has rebuilt, but marks remain,” August 25, 2016