NEWS

Alfred Station: Bridging the Past and the Present

Madonna Figura Simon
The Spectator
Jim Ninos, left, and Debra Jakobi, right, unveil a "Legends and Lore" marker that details the origins of the Baker's Bridge hamlet in Alfred Station on Saturday.

ALFRED STATION — It takes just one second to traverse Baker’s Bridge in Alfred Station in today’s modern vehicles, but a new sign may make drivers slow down and reflect on the bridge’s 200-year old origins.

Saturday, as pickup trucks and motorcycles rumbled by, a marker was dedicated at Baker’s Bridge which crosses Canacadea Creek. The cast iron marker, deep red with cream lettering, tells travelers that the Baker’s Bridge hamlet was named for a rudimentary bridge built by “Alpheus Baker, his sons & Joseph Woodruff” when they arrived in the area in 1807 after walking from Rensselaer County near Albany.

The marker was the second to be unveiled in the Alfred community on Saturday. Earlier in the afternoon, a plaque posted outside of the Alfred Village Hall recognized the building’s historic landmark status as the original location of the community’s Firemen’s Hall. Unlike the fire station, Baker’s Bridge lacked the primary source documents to affirm its place in history, so the bridge sign became part of the Legends and Lore marker grant program sponsored by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation. The foundation helps communities preserve local history including, in the case of Baker’s Bridge, “Place-name anecdotes — traditional stories that explain the reason for the name of a location,” according to the foundation’s website.

“We all tried to find — it’s called primary source information — that says ‘this is Baker’s Bridge.’ The only thing that I could actually give them was a map. I had the 1829 map, the ’69 map. That was good, but they wanted documentation, and most of the stuff we couldn’t find,” Jim Ninos, president of the Baker’s Bridge Historical Association, said, explaining that a fire at the Alfred town hall destroyed documents decades ago.

Laurie Lounsberry Meehan, historian and archivist at Alfred University, said that the committee found historic diary entries in which Alfred-area residents referred to going to “the bridge,” but not Baker’s Bridge specifically. At Saturday’s ceremony, she shared a history of the bridge compiled for Alfred Station’s celebration of the 1976 American Bicentennial. That historical record states that the town of Alfred also included Almond, Andover and Independence until those towns separated in 1821.

“For Alfred Station, the year 1807 is significant because Clark Crandall, Nathan Greene and Edward Greene arrived in May to begin the first settlement in the present day town of Alfred. Thaddeus and Alpheus Baker came along in June of 1807 with their families, heading for their future settlement in what we now call Andover. In order to move themselves and their belongings across Canacadea Creek, they cut down small trees or branches and from them fashioned a crude pole bridge spanning the creek. Without having planned to do so, they provided Alfred Station with the source of its first name: Baker’s Bridge,” she said.

Lounsberry Meehan added that in 1809, the Bakers forged a road between the bridge and Andover, creating a “heavily traveled highway system, if one may so describe a stump-filled path meandering through a primeval forest.” Commerce soon developed including a pail factory, a tannery, sawmill, wool carding mill, taverns and the town’s first post office, along with the train depot that gave Alfred Station its name.

The new sign recognizing the origins of the Baker’s Bridge sits just over a guardrail from the bridge that underwent a $2 million renovation in 2019 including “a new sidewalk for pedestrians and four-foot-wide shoulders to accommodate bicyclists, (and) was constructed with steel reinforced concrete abutments and wingwalls that support precast concrete beams and a concrete deck,” according to the New York State Department of Transportation.

Acknowledging the modern improvements, Ninos also reflected on history, the moment the white settlers chose to build a bridge in what is now Alfred Station.

“I think that was an a-ha moment. I do. I think that was an a-ha moment, and they said, ‘We’re here. We’ve arrived. I think this is where we’re going to build our community,’” Ninos said.

A new sign informs travelers crossing Baker's Bridge in Alfred Station of the bridge's history. The bridge was modernized in 2019, one of many updates since it was built of branches and saplings by white settlers in the early 1800s.