Meems Bottom Covered Bridge
Shenandoah County, near Mount Jackson. Built 1894, 204 ft. long. The longest covered bridge in Virginia and one of the last to carry regular vehicle traffic.
Meems Bottom Covered Bridge is the fourth formal bridge to stand at this crossing of the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. An earlier span was burned in 1862 by Stonewall Jackson's retreating forces during the Civil War, and its 1868 and 1871 successors were both washed out by floods. The current bridge went up in 1894, built by John Woods for landowner Franklin Hiser Wissler to reach his apple orchards at Strathmore Farms — timber for it was cut from the nearby farm once owned by Confederate general Gilbert S. Meem, whose family gave the crossing its name.
At 204 feet, it's the longest covered bridge standing in Virginia today, carried on a Burr arch-truss design: two great wooden arches, each built up from three bolted timber sections, run the full length between stone abutments sunk ten feet into the riverbed. Steel I-beams were added beneath the roadway in 1937 to keep it in service for cars.
On October 31, 1976, vandals set the bridge on fire and it burned to the point of collapse. Rather than replace it outright, the county salvaged what original timber survived and rebuilt the bridge to its historic form, reopening it to traffic by September 1979 — a rare case of a covered bridge coming back from near-total loss. It was first listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, with an updated listing in 2008, and remains open to vehicles on Route 720 near Mount Jackson.
