Captain Swift Covered Bridge
Bureau County, near Princeton. Built 2007, 128 ft. long. Illinois' only two-lane covered bridge, named for a retired 19th-century sea captain.
Captain Swift Covered Bridge sits about a mile west of Princeton in Bureau County, giving the town — already home to the iconic 1863 Red Covered Bridge — a second, much newer covered crossing over Big Bureau Creek. Built in the mid-2000s using traditional 19th-century timber-framing concepts beneath a modern Douglas fir skin, the Burr arch bridge spans 128 feet and is the only two-lane covered bridge anywhere in Illinois, built on the premise that a large, striking wooden structure would draw enough tourism traffic to justify its cost over time.
The bridge's name honors Captain Samuel T. Swift, born in 1784 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, who spent 24 years as a merchant ship captain — by some accounts reaching as far as the northwest coast of North America by sea — before retiring in 1838 to Illinois, where he purchased land in the area. Following a long-standing Illinois tradition of naming covered bridges after nearby landowners, Swift's name has outlived him by more than a century and a half. Together with the Red Covered Bridge a few miles away, it gives Bureau County the distinction of hosting two of Illinois's nine surviving covered bridges.
