August 17, 1923
A vertical-lift bridge crossing the Piscataqua River and connecting the city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with Badger’s Island in the town of Kittery, Maine, was formally inaugurated. This bridge was dedicated to the memory of American soldiers and sailors who had lost their lives during World War I just a few years earlier.
That day’s edition of the Portsmouth Herald reported on the activities and overall enthusiasm that characterized the formal debut of this bridge. “The Interstate Memorial Bridge connecting the states of New Hampshire and Maine was opened at noon today and though there was no regular celebration planned to mark the occasion some five thousand people waited on both sides of the structure to witness the event.”
The public officials on the hand for this opening included Fred H. Brown (1879-1955), who had become governor of New Hampshire in January of that year and would serve in the position until 1925; and Percival P. Baxter (1876-1969), governor of Maine from 1921 to 1925. Making their way across the bridge from the sides of their respective states, both men met at the center of the structure. A pink ribbon had been festooned there to mark the actual boundary between New Hampshire and Maine and, as part of the ceremony, this ribbon was cut by five-year-old Portsmouth resident Helen “Eileen” Dondero (1918-2016).
Dondero, who became known as Ellen Foley after marrying Portsmouth shipyard worker and World War II military veteran John J. Foley (1912-1994) in 1948, was mayor of her hometown in 1968-1971, 1984-1985, and 1988-1997. (Her mother Mary Dondero [1894-1960] served as Portsmouth’s first woman mayor from 1945 to 1947.)
Not long after the ribbon-cutting took place, according to the Portsmouth Herald “the whistles on the river towboats, manufacturing plans and the siren on the bridge opened wide and the rush was on.” This newspaper further reported, “Nearly a thousand boys from the Portsmouth side crowded into the highway [on the bridge] and make quick time to Kittery. On the Maine side cars were lined up for two miles [3.2 kilometers] or more waiting the opportunity to move. These cars were not from Maine and New Hampshire alone but every state in New England, with many from New York and Pennsylvania.”
The section of road crossing the bridge was initially part of New England Interstate Route 1 (also called the Atlantic Highway). When that route and others within the New England road marking system were officially superseded by the U.S. Numbered Highway System in 1927, however, the segment carrying traffic over the Memorial Bridge became part of U.S. Route 1 instead.
The original version of the Memorial Bridge remained in service until being permanently closed on July 27, 2011. As part of the closing ceremony for this bridge on October 1 of that year, Foley tied a blue ribbon on the plaque that had been displayed on the structure. The bridge was demolished the following year.
The present-day version of the Memorial Bridge was opened on August 8, 2013, and Foley – 95 years old by this time – took part in the dedication of the new bridge nearly nine decades after she had helped inaugurate this structure’s predecessor. (The accompanying photo of the original version of the Memorial Bridge was taken in 2006.)
Photo Credit – User:JayDuck (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JayDuck); licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
Additional information on the version of the Memorial Bridge in existence from 1923 to 2021 is available at https://files.portsmouthnh.gov/community/markers/pdf/Memorial%20Bridge%20-%20located%20at%20Harborwalk%20Park%20at%20the%20terminus%20of%20Daniel%20Street%20at%20the%20river1.pdf
For more information on the opening of this bridge, please check out https://downeast.com/history/memorial-bridge-marks-100-years-spanning-the-piscataqua-river/ and https://www.mainememory.net/record/23669
Transportation History 
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