WILLOW CREEK — Two of the three original wooden bridges on the Mattawamkeag River Trail, dating from the 1908 railbed construction, have been replaced with modern wooden truss bridges at a cost of $90,000, the Aroostook County Recreation Council announced this week.
The bridges — located at the one-mile and seven-mile marks — had been inspected annually since the trail opened in 1993 and were showing signs of structural fatigue after fifteen years of continuous use. The new bridges, constructed from treated southern yellow pine with steel reinforcement, are designed to last at least fifty years.
“This trail was built on infrastructure that was already a century old,” said Margaret Hollis, director of the Aroostook County Recreation Council. “The original railroad bridges were never designed for recreational use. We have been maintaining them, but the time had come for replacement.”
The project was funded jointly by the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands ($55,000) and the Aroostook County Recreation Council ($35,000). The work was performed by a Bangor-based construction company with a specialty in wooden bridge restoration.
Jed Thorne, who served as a historical consultant on the project, noted that the bridge at mile seven is the third structure to span the same crossing. “The first was a log bridge built by the logging company in the 1890s,” he said. “The second was the railroad trestle built in 1908. The third is this one. Each generation builds its own bridge, and the crossing endures.”
Frank Delgado, a retired fisheries biologist who would later be elected Third Selectman, praised the replacement as an investment in the town’s tourism future. “The trail is our best argument for why people should visit Willow Creek,” he said. “These bridges are the physical foundation of that argument.”