Grave Creek Bridge

The Grave Creek Bridge spans Grave Creek near the small community of Sunny Valley, about fifteen miles north of Grants Pass, and takes its name from a tragedy that predates the bridge itself by seventy-four years. In the autumn of 1846, sixteen-year-old Martha Leland Crowley died of typhoid fever while traveling with the first emigrant wagon train down the Applegate Trail. Her fiance, a carpenter, built her coffin from boards borrowed off a wagon, and she was buried near a white oak by the creek; the wagon party then drove their livestock and wagons over the grave to disguise and protect it from disturbance. Built in 1920, the 105-foot Howe truss bridge originally carried U.S. Route 99, the Pacific Highway, and now sits directly within view of Interstate 5, earning it a reputation as Oregon's most-viewed covered bridge, glimpsed by millions of freeway travelers each year without most ever stopping. Architecturally distinctive for its six Gothic-arched windows on each side, rounded portal openings, and wood shake roof, the bridge was designed by engineers A.A. Clausen and J. Elmer Nelson and is the last surviving covered bridge in Josephine County. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 29, 1979, the bridge closed for repairs in the late 1990s and reopened in 2001, and remains open to vehicle traffic on the local Sunny Valley Loop Road today.