Coldwater Covered Bridge: Alabama's Oldest

The Coldwater Covered Bridge in Oxford is the oldest surviving covered bridge in Alabama. Built around eighteen fifty, it spans sixty-three feet across Coldwater Creek using a rare combination of Multiple King-post and Town Lattice truss construction. Local accounts say it was built by a formerly enslaved carpenter whose name is not recorded.

The bridge partially burned in nineteen twenty but was repaired and carried motor traffic until a concrete replacement arrived in nineteen seventy-four. Threatened with demolition, it was saved, fully restored in nineteen ninety, and moved to Oxford Lake Park, where it stands today as both an engineering relic and a quiet monument to the skilled Black craftsmen who built much of the antebellum South.