Thompson Mill Covered Bridge
Shelby County, near Cowden. Built 1868, 160 ft. long. The narrowest covered bridge in Illinois, prefabricated in Michigan and hauled to the Kaskaskia River by wagon.
Thompson Mill Covered Bridge, also called the Dry Point Bridge, crosses the Kaskaskia River two miles northeast of Cowden in Shelby County. At just 10 feet 7 inches wide against a 160-foot-4-inch length, it's the narrowest covered bridge left in Illinois — a Howe truss span built in an unusual way for the era: rather than being built on-site, the bridge was fabricated in Michigan, shipped to Shelbyville, and hauled the rest of the way to the river crossing by horse-drawn wagon before being assembled in the autumn of 1868 at a cost of $2,500.
The bridge took its name from a nearby corn mill and sawmill that operated from 1843 to 1914, and the road it carried was an important corridor linking Springfield, Taylorville, and Effingham. Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, the bridge has since been closed to automobile traffic but remains open to pedestrians, standing today as one of only a handful of genuinely 19th-century covered bridges left anywhere in the state.
