New Woods Hole Drawbridge Will Have Same Simple Design As 70-Year-Old Span

FALMOUTH- When members of the Woods Hole Community Association heard the Woods Hole drawbridge would need to be replaced, they began a lengthy process of working with the town engineers on the design for a new bridge. They wanted to ensure the important structure that occupies the center of the village would stay essentially the same.
Thomas H. Renshaw of Leslie Street, Woods Hole, president of the association, said the main issues were that the new bridge look like the old bridge, with the same railing—a simple steel balustrade—and the same gate system.
“We were concerned there would be a bunch of bells and whistles and lights flashing for the operation of the gates. We didn’t like that,” Mr. Renshaw said.
So, the new bridge will look very much like the old one, but without the rust that was hampering the operation.
“It’s very rusty. It really has run its course,” Mr. Renshaw said of the bridge.
The gates that stop traffic while the drawbridge is raised will still be operated by hand. And the schedule for the raising of the bridge, every half-hour or so during the busy summer, and hourly or less frequently in the off-season, will remain.
The current bridge replaced an old wooden structure that was destroyed in the 1938 hurricane. That bridge was not able to be raised when there were high winds.
Other improvements in the “new” bridge that was installed in 1940 were sidewalks and holes in the structure that allowed snow and dirt to fall through. Anything accumulated slid backward with each raising of the earlier bridge.
A granite stone from that bridge now sits at the entrance to the Woods Hole Community Hall, engraved with the year the hall was built in 1879.
The Eel Pond bridge is tied to the use of Spritsail sail boats in Woods Hole. The boats have a removable mast and therefore could be brought under the Eel Pond Bridge before it was a drawbridge.
There have been a number of bridge tenders over the years, and Mr. Renshaw remembers many of them, including George W. Chadwick, who operated the bridge when Mr. Renshaw was a child. Mr. Chadwick died in 1961 at the age of 84, on a day off from tending the bridge.
Born in Quissett, Mr. Chadwick was the grandson of a retired whaling captain. He attended the one-room Quissett school, and then attended the three-room Woods Hole School.
For 32 years, he tended the Woods Hole drawbridge, spending six days a week in the tiny gate house above the Eel Pond channel. When a boat signaled, blowing “two long and two short,” as he put it, he would close the gates to block the road and sidewalk on either side of the bridge, then operated the electric motors to raise the bridge. His workday was about 14 1/2 hours and on a summer day, he opened the bridge about 30 times.
In an interview with an Enterprise reporter before he died, Mr. Chadwick recalled when the bridge was “a wooden arch that permitted only rowboats and sailboats small enough to unstep their masts to pass under.” At low tide it was possible to walk across the waterway without using the bridge. The Marine Biological Laboratory eventually got the town to deepen the channel to eight feet at low tide, nine feet at high tide, according to the article. The channel is now about 13 feet deep, according to Mr. Renshaw.
In order to speed the bridge replacement project, the new bridge that is being installed beginning later this month was constructed off-site. But putting the structure in place will still take about eight months. During that time, traffic will be rerouted around Eel Pond.
Pedestrians, though, will be able to use a new retractable walkway that was installed last year for the project.
The bridge was originally supposed to be replaced beginning last September, but there was a fire at the warehouse of the company manufacturing the bridge, and the entire project had to be delayed for one year, according to Falmouth Town Engineer Gaetano G. Calise Jr., who is in charge of the project.