Covered Bridges in Lyndonville: The Sanborn or Centre Bridge

Restoration stalled, in 2014.

Postcard promoting the Sanborn Bridge.

First, a little background on the Sanborn family, whose holdings included this utilitarian covered bridge -- and then the Vermont Historic Register nomination's statement of significance of the bridge.

(from Child’s Gazetteer 1887). Dea. Benjamin Sanborn was born in Wheelock, October 16, 1798. He was the fifth child of a family of twelve—eight boys and four girls—all but one of whom lived to adult age. At the age of twenty Benjamin purchased of his father the remaining year of his minority, and struck out in life for himself. October 26, 1830, he was married to Miss Abigail B. Stanton, daughter of Isaac W. Stanton, of  North Danville. At the age of thirty-two, having accumulated, by industry and strict economy one or two thousand dollars, he purchased the farm in Lyndon, where he lived and died, a large part of the land being then heavily timbered with the stately maple, elm and hemlock. His own strong arm felled the forest, and by years of earnest, manly endeavor, the farm became one of the most productive and valuable in town.  In the summer of 1866 he sold to the Connecticut and Passumpsic Rivers Railroad Company 150 acres of the farm on which to locate and build the general offices and repair shops of the company, and where the thriving village of Lyndonville now stands, reserving to himself about forty acres of the meadow land, now owned and occupied by his son, Isaac W. Sanborn. He had two children, I. W. Sanborn, last named, and Martha A., now the wife of Dr. J. W. Copeland, of Lyndonville. Mr. Sanborn was a man of regular habits, strong and robust in health, possessed of good common sense, sound judgment, and a well balanced mind. He was an active member of the Free Baptist church in town for over thirty years, its deacon nearly as long, and until his death. In his early years his political views were Democratic, and later he was a Free  Soiler and Republican. He lived a long and useful life, was honored and respected by all, and passed to his rest August 28, 1876, after a brief illness, like a shock of corn fully ripe, in his seventy-eighth year.