Red Covered Bridge

North of Princeton, spanning Big Bureau Creek, stands one of the few surviving covered bridges in Illinois. The Red Covered Bridge was built in eighteen sixty-three at a cost of three thousand one hundred forty-eight dollars and fifty-seven cents, the county paid every penny. Its Howe through-truss design stretches nearly one hundred fifty feet.

The bridge was once part of the Peoria to Galena Trail, a frontier road that carried commerce across northern Illinois before the railroads arrived. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-five. In late twenty twenty-three a semi truck clipped the structure and forced an indefinite closure, but a repair plan cleared the State Historic Preservation Office in December twenty twenty-four. The bridge is a rare survivor of the Civil War era in a region that lost most of its wooden infrastructure to flood and neglect.