Gilliland-Reese Bridge: Built by Neighbors, Saved by a Park

In eighteen ninety-nine, Etowah County Commissioner Jesse Gilliland directed a bridge-building project that was less a government contract than a community barn-raising. Local merchants donated the materials, and men from surrounding farms and towns volunteered their labor. The result was a Town lattice truss covered bridge of rough-hewn lumber spanning Little Wills Creek near present-day Reece City, giving rural families a reliable crossing where they had long forded the water by season.

The bridge also became a gathering spot and meeting place in the years that followed. When a concrete span replaced it in the nineteen twenties, the old bridge sat idle until nineteen sixty-seven, when it was moved to Noccalula Falls Park in Gadsden. Restored and reroofed, it now stands beside the falls as one of a handful of surviving nineteenth-century covered bridges in Alabama, a quiet reminder of the era when neighbors built the roads between them.