The Covered Bridge at Temperance Wayside

Contributed by Evelyn Edson, president
Scottsville Museum

“We rattle through the Hardware River’s old-timey “rabbit burrow” bridge,” wrote Virginia Moore, talking about life in Scottsville between the wars. This was the covered bridge built about 1850 at Temperance Wayside where Highway 6 crosses the Hardware River. Sheridan’s departing troops had clattered over it in 1865.  A painting by Cornelia Burgess Dorrier shows this picturesque bridge in the early 20^th century, a subject to which she was to return often.  In 1956 when Mrs. Dorrier was interviewed by The Scottsville Sun, the old bridge was gone, destroyed by high water and replaced with a modern bridge.

In 1900 Virginia had over one hundred covered bridges. They were designed to protect the road surface, usually made of wooden planks, from weathering. The arrival of the automobile led to a demand for two-lane roads, and bridges that could accommodate heavy loads and higher clearance. The seven covered bridges that remain in Virginia are mostly on private or park land and no longer carry traffic. VDOT (“Covered Bridges in Virginia”) has a delightful video on these survivals and makes us regret that ours is gone.
Beside the bridge was Temperance Wayside, a small park with a picnic table. Virginia built a number of these, beginning in 1934, to accommodate picnicking travelers in the days before fast food restaurants. The wayside survived into the 1970s when a final flood did it in, and it was not restored.
Cornelia Burgess Dorrier was the sister of the photographer, William E. Burgess. Her artistic tastes led her to painting, and she attended art school as a young student. She also expressed her artistic tastes through flower gardening and flower arranging. Her granddaughter, Irene Dorrier, has given the museum a number of programs Cornelia had saved from Scottsville Garden Shows in the 1950s along with her prize ribbons mostly for peonies and dahlias.