Arson, Floods, and Box Trucks: How America Keeps Losing Covered Bridges
Somewhere between 750 and 900 covered bridges are still standing in the United States, depending on whose count you trust and how generously you define "covered bridge." In the middle of the 19th century the number was in the thousands. That gap is the whole story, and it isn't mostly a story about rot.
Wooden bridges are surprisingly durable when nobody bothers them. Keep the roof tight and the trusses dry and a good one will outlast the town that built it. What kills them is people — sometimes on purpose, usually by accident, and occasionally by way of a river that has had enough.
The Honeymoon Bridge in Jackson, New Hampshire — built in 1876 by Charles Austin Broughton and his son Frank, 121 feet of Paddleford truss. Photo via Wikimedia Commons, freely licensed.
The match
At least three dozen American covered bridges have burned at the hands of arsonists. Not lightning, not a stray cigarette — deliberate fires, set by people who apparently looked at a 140-year-old timber structure and saw kindling.
The one that still stings is Bridgeton, in Parke County, Indiana. J.J. Daniels put up a double-span Burr arch there in 1868, across Big Raccoon Creek beside the old mill, and for 137 years it was the most photographed bridge in a county that calls itself the Covered Bridge Capital of the World. On April 28, 2005, somebody burned it down.
What happened next is the part worth remembering. Bridgeton is not a large place. Its residents raised money, hired the builder Dan Collom, and put up a full-scale reproduction from the original plans. It was dedicated October 1, 2006 — seventeen months from ashes to ribbon-cutting. Purists will tell you it's a replica, and they're right. Go stand in it anyway.
The water
August 28, 2011 was the worst day American covered bridges have had in living memory. Hurricane Irene came up the Northeast as a tropical storm and turned every trout stream in Vermont and eastern New York into something unrecognizable.
The Bartonsville Covered Bridge in Rockingham, Vermont — 151 feet of town lattice truss, built by Sanford Granger in 1870 — came off its stone abutments and went down the Williams River essentially intact. A neighbor filmed it. The video is grim in a very specific way: the bridge doesn't break apart, it floats, like it's leaving under its own power. Rockingham voted to spend the insurance money on wood rather than concrete, and the new Bartonsville opened January 26, 2013 at a cost of about $2.56 million.
The same floodwaters took the Old Blenheim Bridge on Schoharie Creek in New York. That one hurt on a different scale: built in 1855, a 210-foot clear span, the longest single-span covered bridge in the world. Rebuilding it took until 2018 and roughly $6 million.
The truck
Fire and flood get the headlines. The daily attrition is duller and far more common: a driver who doesn't know how tall his vehicle is.
This is why so many surviving bridges have a steel pipe slung across the approach on chains — the "headache bar," which is meant to be hit so the portal isn't. They get hit constantly. The Concord Road covered bridge in Cobb County, Georgia has warning signs, flashing lights, and a headache bar, and drivers still clip it several times a year. Every strike is a repair bill, and a bad one can take out a fracture-critical member on a structure where there is no redundancy at all.
Bartram's Covered Bridge, built 1860 by Ferdinand Wood — thirty feet of Burr truss and the last of thirty that once stood in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Photo via Wikimedia Commons, freely licensed.
What actually saves one
The bridges in the best shape are frequently the ones that stopped doing their job. Bartram's, on the Chester–Delaware county line, was closed to traffic in 1941 when a modern span went in beside it. It sat neglected for decades, got a proper restoration in 1995, and is now looked after by a volunteer commission drawn from two townships. Thirty feet long, built by Ferdinand Wood in 1860, named for Mordecai Bartram, and the only one of Delaware County's thirty covered bridges left.
That's the pattern. Not a grant program, not a plaque — a small group of people who decide the thing is theirs. Rockingham chose wood over concrete because Bartonsville residents showed up and argued for it. Bridgeton exists because a village raised the money. Bartram's is standing because two townships share a committee that meets about a bridge nobody drives on.
There will be another flood, and there will be another fire. The bridges that come back are the ones somebody has already decided to fight for.