VOLUME 22/NUMBER 3/SUMMER 2024       Connecticut Explored

Bridge across the Connecticut River at Hartford , 1908. G ouache and black ink on wove paper mounted on cardboard. The Graphics Collection, The Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, 1983.120.0

By Kristen Levithan

The October 9, 1908, edition of The Hartford Courant was rapturous in its description of “Bridge Week,” a three-day celebration that accompanied the dedication of the Hartford Bridge. William Gunn, Hartford’s police chief, reported that 250,000 revelers clogged the city’s streets, taking in parades, pageantry, and spectacles such as a reenactment of Thomas Hooker and his followers crossing the Connecticut River and arriving in Hartford. As a boy, Francis Goodwin II, a founder of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, played one of Hooker’s acolytes, wearing “buckled knee breeches, [a] little black jacket with wide white collar, and a broad-brimmed, high-pointed hat.” In “The Three Great Days,” Goodwin’s presentation of his recollections of Bridge Week to the Monday Evening Club of Hartford in October 1967, he declared that “Hartford had never seen such a great and glorious party” (Connecticut Explored, Winter 2003).

For most of history, those who wanted to cross the Connecticut River at the place that became Hartford were left to their own devices. In Crossing the Connecticut, George E. Wright outlined the later options (Smith-Linsley, 1908). In December 1681, Hartford gave Thomas Cadwell the right to run a public ferry. This ferry and its successors served the public for over a century until a toll bridge was constructed in 1810. That wooden structure was destroyed by ice and flooding in 1818 and was soon replaced by the Old Hartford Toll Bridge, which connected Morgan Street in Hartford and Connecticut Avenue in East Hartford. When that crossing succumbed to fire on May 17, 1895, the General Assembly created the Connecticut River Bridge and Highway District Commission to design and finance a new, modern bridge to accommodate Connecticut’s rapid industrialization and population growth.

Construction of the Hartford—now Bulkeley—Bridge took three years and cost $3 million (the equivalent of over $100 million in 2024). The nine arches of the neoclassical stone bridge featured concrete foundations and granite from Guilford’s Leetes Island and Branford’s Stony Creek. In a review for Cassier’s Magazine: An Engineering Monthly (vol. 33, November 1907–April 1908), E. W. Winans praised the bridge, declaring that its “size of arch, of length and breadth, combined with its perfection of structure and symmetry of outline, . . . makes plain the claim of superiority.” This superiority was largely to the credit of the “sandhogs” who toiled tirelessly in perilous conditions beneath the riverbed, carving out the foundation for each granite arch. In “The Sand Hogs Set the Foundation for the Bulkeley Bridge” (ConnecticutHistory.org, August 15, 2020), Steve Thornton found that many of these sandhogs were Black laborers who earned no more than $2.50 a day.

Chapin News Company, Old Bridge (CoveredTollBridge), Hartford, Conn.,1910.Postcard.Richard Mahoney Collection, Hartford History Center, Hartford Public Library.

James Goodwin McManus, The Temporary Bridge, Connecticut River,Hartford, 1906.Oil on canvas.The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art,1954.59.

Robert Weller,“New Stone Arch Bridge, Hartford, Connecticut,”
”Advertisement, 1904.The Graphics Collection, Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, 2000.210.9.

According to the March 1993 National Register of Historic Places application submitted by the Connecticut Department of Transportation (CT DOT), building the Hartford Bridge was “the largest civic improvement project undertaken in the Hartford area up to the time,” one which included a City Beautiful–inspired vision that extended beyond the bridge’s footprint. Connecticut Boulevard was created on the east side to give visitors a grand approach to the capital city. To make room for a riverside approach to the bridge between Morgan and Pleasant streets on the west side, tenement housing and small business buildings were razed, displacing hundreds of families. These “improvements” disappeared a few decades later when the construction of Interstates 84 and 91 even more dramatically altered the neighborhoods of Hartford.

Building the Hartford Bridge, July 14, 1906. The closest abutment displays granite from Leetes Island and Stony Creek. Gelatin silver print on paper. The Graphics Collection, Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, 1967.96.9.

Morgan G. Bulkeley, chair of the Connecticut River Bridge and Highway District Commission, at his desk at the Aetna Life Insurance Co. in Hartford. 1890. Albumen print on paper on cardboard mount. The Graphics Collection, Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, 1969.20.1.199

The Hartford Bridge was renamed the Bulkeley Bridge in 1922 in memory of Morgan Bulkeley, who chaired the Connecticut River Bridge and Highway District Commission that issued the bonds that financed the bridge. Among other distinctions, Bulkeley was a Civil War veteran, the first president of baseball’s National League, president of the Aetna Life Insurance Company, mayor of Hartford, governor of Connecticut, and a United States Senator. Like any public figure, Bulkeley had his detractors, but naming the bridge after him has caused little controversy. In fact, the CT DOT recently held a meeting to share its plan to add aesthetic lighting to the Bulkeley Bridge to emphasize “the beautiful stone details of one of Connecticut’s landmark bridges” (The Hartford Courant, February 2, 2024). As the CT DOT shines new light on Morgan Bulkeley and his bridge, these photos illuminate a fuller story of the bridge’s construction and legacy.

Kristen Levithan is Connecticut Explored’s editor and education specialist.

Recreating Thomas Hooker’s arrival in Hartford during Bridge Week, October 1908.Gelatin silver print on paper. The Graphics Collection, Connecticut Museum of Culture and History,1976.64.20.

Spectators fill the bleachers along Connecticut Boulevard in Hartford during Bridge Week, October 1908.Gelatin silver print on paper. The Graphics Collection, Connecticut Museum of Culture and History,2000.210.8