Frenchtown to Stockton, New Jersey
The fog held overnight. I had coffee and a muffin near the bridge I’d photographed the night before, watched the Delaware disappear into gray about a hundred yards downstream, and came up with a plan of sorts: photograph every bridge between Frenchtown and Lambertville. There are several spanning the river along this stretch, each connecting New Jersey to Pennsylvania, each with its own history, each doing the quiet work of linking two states across a river that was once the boundary of the known world.
It wasn’t a grand plan. But it was a plan, and on a foggy December morning in small-town New Jersey, that’s enough.
The Morning Walk
I walked the river path first — the Delaware and Raritan Canal State Park trail that runs along the waterbank — and had the experience that small towns reliably deliver and cities reliably don’t: every single person I passed said good morning. Not a nod. Not a near-acknowledgment. Eye contact, a smile, an actual good morning. Dog walkers, joggers, a woman who agreed that yes, the fog was amazing.
People aren’t naturally unfriendly in cities. They’re just armored. The armor is practical. The absence of it, out here on a foggy river path in New Jersey at 8 a.m., is something you notice.
The Uhlerstown-Frenchtown Bridge
The bridge connecting Frenchtown to Uhlerstown, Pennsylvania has been crossing this river in some form since the 1840s, when it was a long wooden covered structure on stone piers stretching over a thousand feet. It survived fires and floods and decades of hard use before being replaced with the steel truss bridge that stands today, built in 1931 on those same original stone foundations. It has survived every major flood since, including the 1955 storm that took out bridges up and down the Delaware.
Frank, who I’ve mentioned more than once on this trip, told me he used to canoe the Delaware and stop at one of these bridge supports mid-river for wine and cheese. I don’t know which bridge it was. He probably doesn’t remember either. But that’s the kind of memory a bridge earns when you’ve been in a place long enough to make stories around it.
The Farm in the Fog
Between Frenchtown and Stockton I drove up a hill looking for a vantage point and found mostly other people’s homes, which is always how that goes. What I did find, on the way back down, was a shot: a farmhouse set back in the fog, a barren tree in the foreground, a fence line running toward it. Cold, still, the kind of image that December makes available when you stop thinking of it as the death of fall and start seeing it as its own kind of light.
I shot it three different ways. One of them worked.
The deer were out in force. I counted four in a field, then another cluster near the road, then more I didn’t bother counting. New Jersey, in December, along the Delaware: more deer than any state I’ve been in this year. That is not a sentence I expected to write.
The Center Bridge
The Center Bridge at Stockton is the third on the route, and it carries the weight of the main crossing that once connected Philadelphia to New York along Old York Road. The first bridge here was a wooden covered toll bridge built in 1814, replacing an earlier ferry. Fire, floods, structural failures — the same story the other bridges tell. It burned completely in 1923. The bridge standing today was built in the late 1920s, higher and stronger, and survived the 1955 flood that destroyed much of what was around it.
There’s a pattern to these bridge histories. Built, damaged, rebuilt. Built again, damaged again, rebuilt higher. The river doesn’t negotiate. The towns keep rebuilding. That’s less about engineering and more about what people do when something matters to them.
I had a bridge near a family camp in Pennsylvania growing up — the Nebraska Bridge, along the reservoir. Got wiped out by floods more than once. Always rebuilt. It was where we fished, where we stopped on the boat to mark distance, where someone always took a picture. Every community has one of those. Down here along the Delaware, there are several. They all have that quality.
Lambertville next, then Trenton, and then I drove a rainy evening into Pennsylvania. More on that next time.
