At the corner of West River and Maple streets (144 West River St.) in Milford is an Italianate mansion built sometime in the 1850s. It was once the home of Mary Augusta Hepburn Smith (1825-1912), born in New York City, who married Edwin Porter Smith (1813-1890) in 1847. Maintaining her summer home in Milford after her husband’s death, she became, in 1896, a founder and the first Regent of the Freelove Baldwin Stowe Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Mary A. Hepburn Smith made a lasting impact on Milford when she purchased the commercial and industrial properties (mills, factories and low-rent housing affected by an 1899 fire) across from her home along the Wepawaug River (where Duck Ponds and a Kissing Bridge would be created), which she donated to the city as a park. Earlier this year, Mary Hepburn Smith was formally inducted into the Milford Hall of Fame.
The caption has one mistake
(where the duck ponds and a Kissing Bridge would be created.)
The bridge you are referring to is called the Col. Mazeau Bridge. The Kissing Bridge is .03 miles north of the duck pond on Walnut Street where there is just a small bridge needed to cross a very narrow part of the Wepawaug.
The is a common mistake made by many people and has no doubt been printed wrong many times.
not true. Walnut Street was not the original Kissing Bridge, The walnut Street bridge was later called that by some. The kissing bridge was at the north end of the pond where wives would drop off lunches for their husbands working in the water powered manufacturing plant on North Street and getting a peck in return. My Great Grandfather printed postcards (in Germany) of the old wooden bridge ca 1902 and sold them in his pharmacy. I have one of them listing the “Kissing Bridge,” which I would be happy to share. The Walnut Street myth was created by some poet as a cute ditty concerning making up after a return from the nearby “Squabble hill.” Ruth Platt was a small child in 1900 and remembered it that way in her old age. My postcard showing the north end of the pond and factory and the old wooden bridge predates the Mazeau Bridge (1909) by at least a decade. Mine was postmarked in 1908 to Nellie Botsford in Bridgeport, a daughter of that famed local family.