Valley City Covered Bridge
Valley City, Barnes County. Built 1979, small roofed stringer bridge on 12th Street SW — North Dakota's best-documented example of the covered bridge form, in a state with no historic 19th-century tradition.
North Dakota never developed a 19th-century covered bridge tradition, and almost nothing survives from the state's early bridge-building era in covered form. The closest and best-documented example today is a small roofed stringer bridge on 12th Street SW in Valley City, Barnes County.
Built in 1979, the bridge is a modest structure carrying a local street over a small stream near the city's motel district. Like similar modern covered bridges scattered across the Great Plains states, it was built purely for local character rather than as part of any historic transportation network — but its wooden roof and siding give it the same instantly recognizable covered-bridge form found in states with much longer traditions.
It stands today as North Dakota's clearest example of the type, a small-town landmark in a part of the country where the covered bridge is otherwise a rarity.