The old covered footbridge connecting two of the mills in downtown Newmarket was washed away by the May flooding, sometime during the night between May 14 and 15, after one of its concrete support pillars was washed out.

The 114-foot bridge floated three miles down the Lamprey River and washed up near the Great Bay home of Fred Bramante, owner of Daddy’s Junky Music. Ninety feet of the 165-year-old bridge was recovered and towed upriver to an access point off Young Lane. Volunteers then disassembled the bridge and moved it onto land.

The Newmarket Town Council will discuss the fate of the footbridge at a special July 19 workshop. The bridge is the last remaining covered bridge in Rockingham County and possibly the last industrial covered bridge in New England.

A group of concerned citizens, calling themselves the Covered Bridge Alliance, has organized to ensure that the bridge is preserved as an active part of the town. There are no definite plans for the bridge’s future, but local artist Clifford Lynch has made sketches of a possible relocation of the bridge to Schanda Conservation Park, where it would cross the Moonlight Brook. The Newmarket Community Development Corporation, which owns the downtown mills that the bridge connected, has not made any official arrangements to transfer ownership or responsibility of the bridge to any other organization.

“We need to make sure that the responsibility for the ‘known remains’ goes to a group with the financial ability to restore and manage the bridge,” said Arlon Chaffee, president of the NCDC. “We applaud the efforts of those citizens who have stepped up and expressed an interest in the bridge’s future.”