CANTON – Harold Jones set up his lawn chair, tripod and a camera complete with telephoto lens at 5:30 a.m. Thursday morning. He didn’t want to miss a thing.

The two-span, multi-ton steel trussed Gilbertville Bridge was about to be moved.

“We won’t see this again,” he said at about 2:30 p.m. that afternoon.

By midafternoon, the bridge had been moved, inches at a time, about 12 feet. It had been done with the help of dozens of Reed and Reed Inc. employees and Maine Department of Transportation personnel, plus four jacks,

Jones, a longtime Canton resident and retired Bath Iron Works employee, has been taking pictures of the multimillion dollar bridge project for weeks. He wants to document the nearly 70-year-old bridge’s move to make way for a modern, steel and cement bridge.

In his car, he has a collection of dozens of pictures of the major construction project. Some of the pictures and negatives will be shared with the town and the Canton Historical Society.

Jones wasn’t alone in chronicling the bridge’s move.

Nearby was Gene Groleau, also holding a 35 mm camera with a telephoto lens, who also believed he was watching history in the making.

Photo opportunity

A little closer to the bridge, just in front of the warning tape, stood Joyce Carlton with her camera. Born and brought up in Canton and the hamlet of Gilbertville, she wants to see the whole process.

“We definitely need a new bridge,” she said. “It has been dangerous since it was hit with ice during the 1980s.”

But she also thinks that it’s really important to document its move, and eventually, to see its dismantling and replacement by a newer structure.

“It’s a part of our history,” she said.

Jerry LeBlanc, also a longtime resident of the town, was among the dozen or so spectators watching closely as the base of the 450-foot-long bridge slowly slid across a steel beam layered with wax and grease.

“This is an ambitious project. The bridge is a landmark, but it will be nice to have a new one,” LeBlanc said.

Second try

Moving the bridge was supposed to happen last week. In fact, legal ads appeared in several newspapers saying that drivers would have to find alternate routes across the Androscoggin River.

But the first try didn’t work.

DOT bridge designer Eric Calderwood said the beam, wax and grease process just didn’t work on the entire bridge span. The center section didn’t want to move, and it began twisting. So engineers cut the bridge at its halfway point, which rested on a pier in the middle of the river.

With the help of jacks on both sides of the bridge, plus jacks on each end of the severed bridge sections, it worked. Both ends of the bridge, along with both ends on the pier now moved at the same time, a few inches at a time.

Calderwood was hopeful that the entire bridge would be moved to the temporary abutments by dark Thursday. Then, he also hoped, the bridge would reopen for traffic on Friday.

The old bridge will provide a temporary crossing of the river while the new, 500-foot long structure is being built. Work is expected to continue through the winter, with a target date for completion of next fall.

The new bridge will have wider lanes, an 8-foot sidewalk and no overhead supports to be hit by large vehicles.

Calderwood said some of the steel in the old bridge will be given to the local snowmobile club for its use in building bridges. The rest will likely be melted down by the general contractors, Reed and Reed of Woolwich.

The new bridge will also have three spans and two piers buried in the river.

The soon-to-be-obsolete Gilbertville Bridge was built by the PGH-Des Moines Steel Co. of Pittsburgh, which built many of the remaining steel-trussed bridges dotting the landscape of Western Maine.

It was named for Charles and Zimeri Gilbert, brothers who owned sawmills in that section of Canton in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The bridge replaced another that was washed away by the flood of 1936.

eadams@sunjournal.com

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