Red Covered Bridge: Illinois' Oldest

Spanning Big Bureau Creek north of Princeton, the Red Covered Bridge is the oldest covered bridge still standing in Illinois. Completed in eighteen sixty-three, while the Civil War raged to the south, Bureau County paid for it partly with public subscription, at a total cost of just over three thousand dollars. The one-hundred-forty-nine-foot wooden span was once part of the old Peoria to Galena Trail. It earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-five, and although it has been closed to traffic since a truck struck it in November of two thousand twenty-three, it remains a rare relic of the Lincoln era.