Coggeshall Street Bridge

 

Dear Mr. History Person,
[Recently] on the radio, people were talking about the old Coggeshall Street Bridge that was replaced in the early 1960s. The question came up about whether or not the old bridge was a drawbridge that opened. No one could answer. How about you?
—R.L., Fairhaven

There wouldn’t be a whole lot of folks around who remember if it opened or closed, because it stopped doing that seventy-one years ago.

The old Coggeshall Street Bridge did have a draw to allow passage for larger vessels to access factories to the north. Damage from the Hurricane of 1938 put an end to the opening and closing of the bridge. Further damage from Hurricane Carol in 1954 stopped buses and large trucks from crossing the bridge. In 1964 a causeway, officially named the Arthur J. Mullen Bridge, replaced the old bridge. For a time the old bridge and the new causeway (which is still informally referred to as the Coggeshall Street Bridge) stood side by side.

Howland Road

OK, Mr. History Person,
Since now I know who the different Howlands were [from the Navigator’s “Encyclopedia Fairhaven”], which one is Howland Road named after? Just curious.
Best, —B.F., Arsene Street

To be honest, I’m not quite sure.

The most likely choice was the one who owned the property at the time the Coggeshall Street Bridge was built and the road was run to it from Main Street. That was John H. Howland (born 1834) who was a Selectman during the time Henry H. Rogers was Superintendent of Streets. But his father, John Milton Howland (born 1810) had owned that property previously and his father Capt. John Howland (born 1776) was also associated with that property. (The ship John Howland that rescued Manjiro Nakahama was named after that first Capt. Howland.)

The large red home at the southwest corner of Main Street and Howland Road was the home of at least two of those three John Howlands.

In 1890, the construction of the Coggeshall Street Bridge was begun. On January 11 of that year, Town Meeting voted to accept the layout of a street leading west from Main Street to the eastern end of the proposed bridge. (Oddly, an “Oxford Heights” map printed in the 1895 Bristol County Atlas shows that roadway named Coggeshall Street, but the 1899 Fairhaven directory lists it as Howland Road, from the Acushnet River to Main Street, and has no Fairhaven Coggeshall Street at all. Our Coggeshall Street was run from Adams Street to Alden Road sometime later and the whole stretch became Howland Road in the 1990s.)

Howland Road was named after one of the John Howlands or the Howland family in general.

Fort Phoenix Tunnel?

Dear Mr. History Person,
Is there really a tunnel that runs from Fort Phoenix under the harbor? If so, when was it built and why?
—T.L.P., Acushnet

Time to put to rest one of the most frequently asked Fort Phoenix questions.
Many folks have very strongly held beliefs that there are "secret" tunnels crisscrossing Fairhaven and most of them lead to Fort Phoenix. Some people think there’s a Fort Phoenix to Fort Taber tunnel. Some people maintain a tunnel runs from Fort Phoenix all the way across town to a house in the vicinity of Adams Street and Linden Avenue.

Most of these folks are wrong.

The biggest obstacle to most of the Secret Fort Phoenix Tunnel theories is that the fort was built atop a solid granite ledge. It’s tough to get deeper than a couple of feet anywhere around the fort without hitting bedrock. And before Henry H. Rogers had huge chunks of granite ledge quarried to build the Unitarian Church and Fairhaven High School, there was considerably more rock to the north of the fort than we see today. It even pokes out of the ground again in that high outcropping near Doane Street and in other spots. It would be pretty tough with primitive equipment to bore very far through that stuff, especially in light of obstacle number two.

The second obstacle to the Secret Fort Tunnel theories is the "secret" part. A couple of months ago I wrote about how laying the pipe to run the Herring River underground in 1903-1905 required huge sums of money and years of labor by hundreds of Italian workers using "modern" steam powered equipment, including a narrow gauge railroad for carting around the fill. For the life of me I cannot figure out how people think that in the 1700s or 1800s a tunnel could be dug across town or under the harbor "secretly."

The third obstacle is simply the question why? Why engage in such an expensive and massive undertaking so somebody could get from Adams Street to the fort?

Fourth, how have these tunnels never been discovered and made public during all of the subsequent digging and building, especially during the construction of the New Bedford-Fairhaven Hurricane Barrier in the 1960s?

No, there have never been historical secret tunnels at Fort Phoenix. But there is a modern one. And it crosses under the harbor. And like all tunnels worth their salt, it took a huge amount of money, time and equipment to build.

The coffer dam in the harbor during the building of the Hurricane Barrier. The dark area is water. Coming up from the lower left is the Fairhaven side of the barrier, and yes, those are cars parked on it.

That tunnel is part of the Hurricane Barrier itself. It was built beneath the channel, 35 feet deep, under the gates. It makes it possible for workers from the Army Corps of Engineers to cross back and forth between the New Bedford and Fairhaven sides. If one understands how the Army Corps built a cofferdam in the middle of the harbor, pumped it dry, and drove trucks and earthmoving equipment on the dry river bottom, one will understand how impossible it would have been to secretly build a tunnel to Fort Taber in historical times.

So yes, Virginia, there is a tunnel. But it’s modern. And it was never a secret.