Ramp Creek Covered Bridge

Ramp Creek Bridge is Indiana's oldest surviving covered bridge and its only double-barreled (two-lane) covered bridge, with two 11-foot-wide lanes each 12 feet high. It was built in 1838 by builder Henry Wolf(e), with Chillion Johnson as foreman, using a single-span Burr arch truss, and originally stood in Franklin Township, Putnam County, carrying a road over Ramp Creek near the community of Fincastle — not, as sometimes recalled, over Big Walnut Creek. Financed under Indiana's 1836 internal improvements act, the bridge served that crossing for nearly a century. In 1932, road construction threatened to have the bridge dismantled and destroyed; conservationist Richard Lieber, founder of Indiana's state park system, spearheaded an effort to save it, and the bridge was carefully disassembled and moved to become a gateway structure at the newly established Brown County State Park. It was reassembled at the park's north entrance, where it now spans a fork of Salt Creek rather than its namesake Ramp Creek. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993, the bridge remains in daily service today carrying state park entrance traffic, with a posted 9-foot clearance and 3-ton weight limit, making it a functioning, actively used historic structure rather than a static relic.