The Real Bridges of Madison County

In 1992, a University of Northern Iowa business professor named Robert James Waller wrote a slim novel in about two weeks. The Bridges of Madison County went on to sell more than 60 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century, and in 1995 Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep turned it into a film that sent tourists streaming into a quiet farming county southwest of Des Moines. There was even a Broadway musical in 2014. Whatever you think of the love story — and plenty of critics thought very little of it — the bridges themselves are real, they're still there, and their actual history is stranger than anything Waller invented.

Madison County built nineteen covered bridges between 1868 and 1889, mostly to carry farm wagons over the Middle, North, and Clanton rivers. Six survive. That's a better ratio than most counties managed, and the locals have paid dearly to keep it that way — as we'll get to.

The Roseman, the one with the ghost

Photo via Wikimedia Commons (freely licensed) — file page

The Roseman Bridge is the novel's centerpiece — it's the bridge Robert Kincaid is looking for when he pulls into Francesca Johnson's farmyard to ask directions. Harvey P. Jones built it in 1883 over the Middle River, about nine miles southwest of Winterset, and unlike several of its siblings it still stands exactly where he put it.

Long before Waller found it, locals called the Roseman the haunted bridge. The story dates to 1892, when two sheriff's posses cornered an escapee from the county jail inside the span. According to the telling, the man let out a wild cry, rose straight up through the roof, and was never seen again. Make of that what you will. A county that can sustain a ghost story for 130 years was always going to handle a mere bestseller just fine.

The Cedar, burned twice and built three times

The Cedar Bridge has the hardest-luck story in the county, and it isn't close. Jones built it in 1883, the county moved it in 1921, and a photo of it landed on the cover of Waller's novel. It appeared in the film too, and for years it was the only one of the six you could still drive through.

Then, on September 3, 2002, someone burned it to the ground. The county rebuilt it from the original plans, using period materials and techniques, and reopened it in October 2004. On April 15, 2017, arsonists burned that one down too. Three teenagers were charged; all three got probation in 2018, plus restitution toward a bridge that cost far more to replace than any of them will repay. Winterset built it a third time and reopened it during the Covered Bridge Festival in October 2019. At this point the Cedar Bridge is less a historic structure than a municipal act of defiance, and I mean that as a compliment.

The other four

Photo via Wikimedia Commons (freely licensed) — file page

The Holliwell Bridge, built in 1880 by Jones and George K. Foster, is the longest of the six at 122 feet and got its own scene in the Eastwood film. It still crosses the Middle River at its original site southeast of Winterset. The Hogback (1884, also Jones and Foster) runs 97 feet across a valley north of town, likewise unmoved. The two 1870 bridges have wandered more: the Imes, the county's oldest, was relocated twice before settling next to St. Charles in 1977, and the Cutler-Donahoe — built by Eli Cox with a distinctive pitched roof — was hauled into Winterset's City Park in 1970, where it's now a five-minute walk from the town square.

If you go

All six bridges are free to visit year-round, connected by a signed driving loop out of Winterset — you can see the lot in an unhurried afternoon. The town has been throwing its Covered Bridge Festival every October since 1970, two decades before Waller ever showed up, which tells you something: the county didn't need a novel to know what it had. The 2026 festival runs October 10–11, and if you want the Roseman to yourself for photographs, go at dawn. Francesca would approve.

Images via Wikimedia Commons; each caption links to the file page with creator and license details.