Riverside Covered Bridge
Butler County, El Dorado. Built 2006, 136 ft. total. Kansas's most substantial modern covered bridge, crossing an arm of the Walnut River.
Riverside Covered Bridge crosses an arm of the Walnut River in El Dorado, Kansas, part of a pair of covered walkways built in the mid-2000s near the town's historic downtown. At roughly 136 feet including its open approach spans (with a 40-foot covered central section), it's the most substantial of Kansas's small stock of covered bridges — all of them modern stringer-built structures, since the state's one genuine 19th-century covered bridge, the 1859 Springdale Bridge in Leavenworth County, burned after a lightning strike in 1958 and was never replaced.
Built in 2006 as a pedestrian amenity along the Walnut River, the bridge complements a companion structure, the ATSF Walkway, built the following year on dry land nearby as part of the same riverside beautification effort. Kansas has no historic covered-bridge tradition of its own, but El Dorado's modern spans give the state a small, genuine, publicly accessible example of the form, a rarity on the Great Plains.