From Cook’s Wharf, we get a pretty good look at the Cribstone Bridge. Depending on the tide and the weather, it can appear to be a neat gray line across Will’s Gut or a great pile of granite with a road balanced on top.
If you only drive across it, though, it’s easy to miss what makes the bridge special. The real story is underneath the roadway, where long granite slabs are stacked in open cribs and the tide runs straight through them.
Officially, it’s the Bailey Island Bridge. Around here, nearly everyone calls it the Cribstone Bridge.
Bailey Island’s Long Wait for a Bridge
Before the bridge, Bailey Island residents traveled by boat. That was part of island life, but storms, winter ice and rough seas could make the trip difficult—or make leaving the island impossible.
Residents began asking for a bridge as early as the mid-1800s. Harpswell turned the request down for years. The idea led to lawsuits, bitter arguments and even threats that the islands might leave the town.
Things finally changed after Maine law allowed the state and counties to help pay for bridge construction. At a special town meeting in October 1923, residents voted to move ahead. A construction contract followed in 1926.
Winning the vote was one problem solved. Building across Will’s Gut was another matter entirely.
A Bridge Designed Around the Water
A shallow rock ledge runs between Orr’s and Bailey islands, with a deeper channel cutting through it. The current can be strong, and a solid causeway or conventional stone piers would have blocked the tide and pushed the water through a smaller space even faster.
Llewelyn N. Edwards of the Maine State Highway Commission came up with the open-crib foundation. Clarence L. Partridge prepared the detailed design layout. Instead of fighting the water, their bridge would let it pass through.
The granite slabs were laid in alternating directions, like the timbers of an old log crib. No mortar or cement holds the cribwork together. The weight and placement of the stone do that. Because the rough-cut slabs weren’t perfectly even, workers drove pine wedges into some of the gaps to keep them from rocking.
The northerly end of the Bailey Island Bridge under construction on June 20, 1927. Courtesy of Maine Preservation.
The stone came from a Bath Granite Company quarry on the Yarmouth–Pownal town line. It was trucked about two and a half miles to a wharf on the Cousins River in Yarmouth, loaded onto scow barges and carried across Casco Bay. A crane then lowered the slabs into place at Will’s Gut.
A crane working at the end of the Bailey Island Bridge in May 1928. Courtesy of Maine Preservation.
Accounts differ on the total amount of granite, putting it somewhere between roughly 10,000 and 14,000 tons. What may be more surprising is the size of the crew: period newspaper accounts indicate that only about 14 men did the work.
The Cribstone Bridge under construction before the roadway was installed, summer 1927. Courtesy of Maine Preservation, as identified by The Portland Press Herald.
The finished bridge measured 1,120 feet, not counting its earth-filled approaches, with an 18-foot roadway between the curbs. A 52-foot concrete span crossed the deepest part of the channel so boats could pass beneath it. The two-year project cost about $139,000.
A Historic American Engineering Record view of the granite cribwork. National Park Service / Library of Congress, public domain.
An Opening Day Fit for Maine
The bridge opened to vehicles on Saturday, September 1, 1928. A much bigger celebration was planned for Labor Day two days later, and organizers expected several thousand people.
There was going to be a parade, a band, speeches, prayers, boat races, water sports, a clambake, a corn roast and an evening dance.
Then it rained nearly all day.
The dedication, clambake and corn roast were washed out, and the races had to be postponed. The parade went ahead anyway. So did the dance.
After decades of arguments and two years of construction, Maine weather got the last word—but not the whole day.
The Sister Bridge Across the Atlantic
Maine’s best-known landmarks have a way of collecting superlatives and legends. Portland Head Light is often called the most photographed lighthouse in the world. No one can really count every photograph, but the claim lasts because it says something true about how people feel about the place.
The Cribstone Bridge has its own version of that story.
MaineDOT says the design was similar to a bridge that had been observed in Scotland. The American Society of Civil Engineers goes a step further, carefully labeling as local lore the story that the Scottish bridge was destroyed by enemy artillery during World War II. In an Island Institute essay about childhood summers on Bailey Island, Dana Wilde remembers being told that the other bridge was in Scotland—or perhaps Ireland, depending on his father’s recollection.
That’s how a good local legend tends to travel. The country shifts. The details get a little foggy. The heart of the story stays put: somewhere across the Atlantic there may once have been another bridge like ours, and now this is the one that remains.
No commonly cited history names that other bridge or gives its exact location, so the wartime story is best told as lore rather than settled fact. The claim that Bailey Island’s is the only one of its kind in the world deserves similar care. Period accounts mention a few much smaller crib-style bridges in Washington County, Maine, but no comparable granite cribstone bridge is known to survive today.
“The only one in the world” may be hard to prove absolutely. Like the Portland Head Light saying, it has lasted because it captures something people recognize: there really isn’t another bridge quite like this one.
Nearly a Century of Everyday Use
For all its fame, the bridge has always had an ordinary job to do. It’s the road home for Bailey Island residents. Delivery trucks cross it. Visitors stop to take photographs. Lobster boats pass through the channel below.
A sidewalk was added in 1951, followed by guardrails about a decade later. The bridge joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and became a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1984.
By 2000, inspections found missing, cracked and shifted stones. Replacement was considered, but the decision was made to preserve the original bridge. During the major rehabilitation, crews reset the granite, replaced as little historic stone as possible and used a temporary bridge to keep Bailey Island connected. The restored Cribstone Bridge reopened in November 2010.
It still needs attention. Two powerful coastal storms in January 2024 pushed some of the granite out of position. MaineDOT repaired the damage that spring, with much of the work timed around low tide. The bridge is tough, but it isn’t simply left alone. Its survival depends on people continuing to care for it.
Still Inspiring New Ideas
Almost a century after it opened, the bridge is inspiring another Maine landmark.
CambridgeSeven looked to the Cribstone Bridge while designing the 245,000-square-foot Alfond Center for Northeastern University’s Roux Institute in Portland. The building’s large central opening, called “The Portal,” echoes the bridge’s open construction. The architects also borrowed the larger idea behind it: a structure that connects people and responds to its place instead of ignoring it.
The Alfond Center will use Maine granite and is expected to be completed in fall 2027. It’s a nice full-circle turn—a bridge built for an island in the 1920s helping shape a new center for science and technology on Portland’s waterfront a century later.
The View From Cook’s Wharf
The bridge inspired our name, too. From Cook’s Wharf, it’s part of the view we know best: beyond the boats, above the running tide and right at the entrance to Bailey Island.
We also get a front-row seat to one of its daily traditions: nervous drivers trying to decide quickly whether an 18 foot span actually constitutes two lanes! Usually everyone makes it through (usually), sometimes after a little mirror-folding and Maine-style diplomacy.
Most days, those drivers probably aren’t thinking about Llewelyn Edwards, a 14-man construction crew or a possibly lost bridge in Scotland. They’re going to work, heading home, visiting the island or hauling something that needs to get where it’s going.
Maybe that’s the best thing about the Cribstone Bridge. It’s a rare piece of engineering and one of Maine’s great landmarks, but it has never stopped being useful. The tide passes through it. Boats pass beneath it. The rest of us pass over it—occasionally holding our breath when a box truck comes the other way.
And from the wharf, we never get tired of looking at it.