The Bridge That Bloomed

Down in Shelburne Falls there's a bridge that's got no business being as lovely as it is, and I love the story of how it happened. Because it starts with a failure.

Back around nineteen-oh-eight the little towns here built themselves a trolley line, and to carry it across the Deerfield River they poured a stout concrete bridge. For about twenty years the trolley clattered back and forth across it, hauling freight and folks. And then the automobile came along and killed the trolley dead, like it did everywhere, and by nineteen twenty-seven the line was bankrupt and the bridge just sat there — a big ugly slab of concrete crossing the river, good for nothing, an eyesore the town was stuck with.

Now here's where it turns. A local woman named Antoinette Burnham looked at that dead, weed-choked bridge and had a notion: why not plant it? Why not haul up soil and turn the whole thing into a garden? Folks might've laughed, but the women's club took it up, the townspeople hauled loam and manure out onto the deck by the wheelbarrow-load, and they planted it — flowers, vines, shrubs, the whole five hundred feet of it.

And it bloomed. It's bloomed every year since, near a hundred years now — a river of flowers strung right across the water, spring to hard frost, tended by hand the whole time. People come from all over the world to walk it. So there's your lesson, free of charge: sometimes the thing everybody calls a useless eyesore just needs somebody with enough imagination to plant it. Go walk the Bridge of Flowers. And thank Antoinette while you're up there.