State Sanitorium Covered Bridge

The State Sanitorium Covered Bridge was built in 1913 by master bridge builder Joseph A. Britton to serve the newly established Indiana State Tuberculosis Sanatorium near Rockville, allowing wagons to haul coal from the Nyesville-area mines to heat the hospital complex. A single-span Burr Arch Truss structure spanning Little Raccoon Creek, it is reputed to be the only Parke County covered bridge originally built with lightning rods, likely owing to its association with the state institution. Like the rest of the county's surviving bridges, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 22, 1978, as part of the countywide Parke County Covered Bridges Multiple Property Submission. After the sanatorium property passed into private hands and the bridge fell into disuse and disrepair, county officials undertook a major relocation and restoration project beginning in 2008, moving the structure about a mile downstream to a new crossing of Little Raccoon Creek at a cost exceeding a million dollars. The rebuilt bridge reopened to vehicle traffic in December 2008 and today carries a local county road, remaining one of the more obscure but historically significant bridges on the county's touring routes, prized for the story of its unusual public-health origins.