Every so often, travelers traversing Lane County’s rural hinterlands drive across covered bridges. Tires slip over wooden flooring as towering paneled walls cast shadows across the windshield.
It’s more than a novelty. It’s history.
Covered bridges in Lane County sprang up in the 1800s and early 1900s, when booming timber companies flourished. Timber barons needed sturdy wood-hewn bridges to haul log harvests off mountain roads and across creeks, rivers and ravines. The roofs and panels of covered bridges shielded the wooden undersides from the rainy, snowy Oregon weather, adding decades to the structures’ lifespans…