the bridge collected tolls used to retire the bonds issued to finance its construction. All tolls were lifted twenty-two years later on October 31, 1953, however, when those original construction bonds were paid off. Original tolls ranged from 10¢ for "one or two horse vehicle including driver" to 50¢ for "auto truck or tractor over 26,000 pounds". Rehabilitation, replacement, and abandonment As the bridge approached its seventieth anniversary with the end of the century, a series of routine safety inspections made by the Maine Department of Transportation revealed that over those seven decades the structure's two main suspension cables and the many vertical bridge deck stringers had become seriously corroded, thereby deteriorating their ability to support the deck, roadway and the traffic that crossed it. These engineering studies made it clear that the bridge required immediate major rehabilitation and eventual replacement. Work was undertaken to rehabilitate the bridge starting in 2000 by Cianbro and Piasecki Steel Construction Corp. with cable work by Williamsport Wirerope Works Inc., by focusing on strengthening the cables. The two cables were done separately, one a time. Piasecki Steel Construction Corp. of Castleton, New York, rehabilitated the north cable in 2002. At this point the bridge was discovered to be beyond permanent repair and would have to be abandoned and replaced by a new structure to be built adjacent to the aging bridge. Work then shifted to temporary strengthening. For the south cable, MDOT in August 2003 hired Pittsfield, Maine-based Cianbro Corp. under a $4-million emergency contract. The rehabilitation used a single wire thickness ( galvanized helical 91-wire strands) to facilitate fabricating and installing the cables more quickly. New concrete anchorages with up to anchor rods were built by Cianbro. Crews installed continuous runs of strands on new saddles bolted and welded on new base plates atop cable bents and the main towers. Workers placed two groups of four strands above each main cable to allow for pulls. Each strand weighs 4 tons (3.6 metric tons). A rope pull was walked across, connected to a pull cable, then winched back across and connected to the strand, which was fed through a tensioner holding back about to smooth the pull. "We hooked and rehooked one strand per day on average," says Archie J. Wheaton, Cianbro project superintendent. "The strands were connected to anchor rods; then we set the sag." The new auxiliary cables are connected to existing