Roddy Road Covered Bridge
Frederick County, near Thurmont. Built c. 1856, rebuilt 2017, 39 ft. long. Maryland's shortest covered bridge, entirely rebuilt after repeated truck strikes.
Roddy Road Covered Bridge crosses Owens Creek just north of Thurmont on a King post truss, and at 39 feet and 4 inches it's the shortest covered bridge left standing in Maryland. The original structure dated to around 1850-56 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, a modest but beloved fixture of rural Frederick County for over a century and a half.
That run nearly ended in 2016, when oversized trucks struck the bridge twice in the space of a month — once on May 18 and again on June 16 — tearing off the portal board and breaking roof braces so badly that much of the wood twisted beyond repair. The bridge was dismantled that October, and engineers determined the surviving timber couldn't be reused. Dean Fitzgerald's Heavy Timber Construction of Frederick built an entirely new replica bridge in its place, and the county took the opportunity to redirect Roddy Creek Road for safer approach angles, add a small park with restrooms and a playground, and install "headache bars" at both ends specifically to keep oversized trucks from striking the new bridge the way they had the old one.