Alamuchee-Bellamy Bridge: Built in Wartime, Still Standing

The Alamuchee-Bellamy Covered Bridge was completed in eighteen sixty-one, the same year the Civil War began, making it one of the oldest covered bridges in Alabama. Confederate Army Captain William Alexander Campbell Jones designed it using yellow pine and wooden pegs in the Town lattice pattern, a design patented by Connecticut architect Ithiel Town in eighteen twenty. The bridge spanned the Sucarnoochee River on the main road between Livingston and York.

Confederate forces under General Nathan Bedford Forrest are said to have used it as a route into Mississippi. A concrete replacement went in during the nineteen twenties, and the old bridge was moved across Alamuchee Creek on a back road, where it stood for decades. In nineteen seventy-one, after a logging truck had damaged it and it sat closed for years, it was restored and relocated again, and set across the northeast end of Duck Pond at the University of West Alabama in Livingston, where it still stands today. The Sumter County Historical Society maintains it as a rare surviving piece of antebellum construction.