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He claims to be the last builder in America of authentic highway covered bridges -- and with good reason. Though now in his late 70s, Milton Graton has never met anyone who does what he and his sons do.
And Graton, an Ashland resident for more than 50 years, carries out his work with the same ability and high standard of quality as those who first built the covered bridges over a hundred years ago.
Graton works with his two sons, Arnold and Stanley, in a large wooden building behind his house. In their workshop -- a combination of the past and the present -- are old woodworking machines, which Graton still uses, tools and pieces from old covered bridges displayed on the walls and more modern equipment, such as the two large trucks he uses to haul the timbers of his bridges. But Graton, who still prefers to use oxen to pull covered bridges into place across rivers and streams, seeks to remain true to the past in his work wherever possible, rejecting any modern methods that would not result in the perfection he always aims for.
Graton and his sons mainly do rigging, which is the tricky process of uprooting a building and moving it to another location. He is confident that they could tackle almost any rigging job, even if it appears to be impossible. "If somebody wants rigging done, and there is nobody qualified to do it," he said, "then that would be something that we would be interested in." The most recent rigging job that the Gratons completed was to move a round barn -- 80 feet in diameter and large enough to accommodate 60 cows -- to the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.
But the main thing that Graton is known for is the rebuilding, renovation and construction of covered bridges. "A covered bridge has friends,"...