Ashland Covered Bridge
New Castle County, Ashland. Built c. 1860, 52 ft. long. A Town lattice truss bridge over Red Clay Creek, one of only two survivors of thirteen bridges once marked along the creek.
Ashland Covered Bridge, also called the Barley Mill Road Covered Bridge, crosses Red Clay Creek on Barley Mill Road in the small community of Ashland in New Castle County. Built around 1860 on a Town lattice truss — the same fast-to-build, low-skill-labor design used across much of the mid-Atlantic — the bridge was originally one of thirteen crossings marked along Red Clay Creek on an 1868 map, back when covered bridges were common infrastructure throughout northern New Castle County.
Today only Ashland and its sister bridge at Wooddale remain of that original thirteen. Ashland Bridge was already recognized as historically significant by 1965, when it was documented in the Historic American Engineering Record survey as one of the last three surviving covered bridges in Delaware, and it was formally added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. The 52-foot bridge has needed steady upkeep over the decades — a deck rehabilitation in 1964, a full rehab with added steel beams in 1982, and a complete restoration of its stone foundation, roof, siding, and deck in 2008 — along with repeated repairs after oversized trucks ignored clearance signage and struck the bridge in both 2011 and 2014, and a 2017 snowplow collision.