Burfordville Covered Bridge

Burfordville Covered Bridge is the oldest of Missouri's four surviving covered bridges, and its history is tangled up with one of the state's oldest working mills. In 1797, George Frederick Bollinger received a Spanish land grant along the Whitewater River and, by 1800, had built a log dam and mill there. The mill burned during the Civil War at the hands of Union troops seeking to deny flour to Confederate forces, and was rebuilt in brick by Solomon Burford in 1867 — the four-story structure that still stands today.

The covered bridge beside it has an equally protracted history. Construction began in 1858 but was delayed for years by the war, finally wrapping up in 1868 around the same time Burford completed his mill and the town of Burfordville was platted. Built by Cape Girardeau builder Joseph Lansmon as part of a private toll road, the 140-foot Howe truss bridge — framed in locally cut yellow poplar — originally had a tollbooth on its east end that operated until 1906. It has weathered plenty since: near-collapse around 1900, a metal roof retrofit in 1950 later swapped back for wood shingles in a 1971 restoration, and a catastrophic 1986 flood that put 17 inches of water over the deck and closed the bridge for over a decade. Reopened to foot traffic in 1998, it remains part of the Bollinger Mill State Historic Site, a rare pairing of a covered bridge and the mill it once served.