Portland Mills Covered Bridge

Built in 1856 by Henry Wolf, the Portland Mills Covered Bridge is tied with the Crooks Covered Bridge as the oldest surviving covered bridge in Parke County. It originally stood over Big Raccoon Creek near the village of Portland Mills, a small settlement founded in 1821 around a grain and sawmill. When the damming of Big Raccoon Creek to create Mansfield (now Cecil M. Harden) Lake threatened to submerge the bridge's original site in the early 1960s, it was carefully dismantled and moved about eighteen miles in January 1961 by house-mover Elmer Buchta, who reassembled it at its present location over Little Raccoon Creek, replacing the Dooley Station Covered Bridge, which had been destroyed by arson in 1960. The bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 22, 1978, as part of the county's Multiple Property Submission. Decades of neglect afterward left its roof and siding missing and one corner fire-damaged, and the structure was closed to traffic in 1982 as it neared collapse. A community-driven restoration campaign in 1996 returned the bridge to its historic appearance and reopened it to vehicle traffic, which it continues to carry today as a single-span Burr Arch Truss structure on a rural county road.