Cavitt Creek Covered Bridge

The Cavitt Creek Covered Bridge carries Cavitt Creek Road over Little River just downstream of its confluence with Cavitt Creek, about twenty miles east of Roseburg near the communities of Peel and Glide. Both the creek and bridge take their name from pioneer settler Robert L. Cavitt, who settled along the waterway in the mid-nineteenth century. Built in 1943 by local craftsman Floyd C. Frear, who also built the Rochester Covered Bridge a decade earlier, the 70-foot Howe truss span gives Douglas County two surviving bridges from the same builder. Its distinctive Tudor-arched portals were deliberately sized to let logging trucks pass through, reflecting the bridge's practical role serving the local timber industry rather than a stagecoach or farm road, and the truss uses unhewn rather than hand-hewn timber chords, a construction detail typical of its wartime-era build. Long, narrow ventilation slits above each truss panel, added for lighting and airflow, give the bridge's interior a distinctive banded-light appearance shared by few other Oregon covered bridges. Though included in Oregon's 1979 statewide covered-bridge NRHP nomination, Douglas County officials blocked its listing at the time, and it remains without individual National Register status today. The Cavitt Creek Bridge remains open to single-lane vehicle traffic, maintained by Douglas County.