Oldtown Covered Bridge
Greenup County, near Oldtown. Built 1880, 190 ft. long. A two-span Burr truss bridge fully disassembled and reconstructed in 1999.
Oldtown Covered Bridge was built in 1880 to carry Frazer Branch Road over the Little Sandy River near the community of Oldtown, completed for a total cost of $4,000 under the supervision of commissioners J.C. Irvin, John Conley, and W.A. Warmack. It's a two-span Burr truss design running roughly 190 feet, and it survived two major floods, in 1913 and 1937, without losing its footing.
The bridge underwent restoration in 1972-73 through the Green Thumb project and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, but structural concerns forced its closure to automobiles in 1985. By 1999 the deterioration was serious enough that the county took the unusual step of fully disassembling the bridge and rebuilding it from the ground up; Transportation Secretary James Codell and other state officials dedicated the restored bridge that September. Oldtown stands today as a preserved landmark in Greenup County, alongside Bennett's Mill one county's worth of covered-bridge history spanning both a Wheeler truss and a Burr truss original.
