Parke County's Covered Bridges: Wood, Water, and J.J. Daniels

Parke County, Indiana, holds thirty-one covered bridges, more than any other county in the United States. The title of Covered Bridge Capital of the World is not marketing hyperbole. It reflects a genuine concentration of nineteenth-century wooden engineering that survives here when it has vanished almost everywhere else.

The Melcher Covered Bridge nearby, built in eighteen ninety-six, is one of nine bridges in the county built by Joseph J. Daniels, a local contractor who became the master craftsman of covered bridge construction in Indiana. Daniels favored the Burr Arch truss, a design that combined a multiple kingpost truss with a long arch spanning the full length of the bridge, giving it both rigidity and resilience. The Melcher Bridge crosses Leatherwood Creek and carries the names of several different eras: it has been called the Klondyke Bridge, the Marion Bridge, and the Leatherwood Bridge at various points in its life. The name Melcher came from a nearby train station on the Cincinnati, Hamilton and Dayton Railway.

Why are there so many covered bridges in this one Indiana county? The short answer is timing and poverty. Parke County built most of its bridges in the second half of the nineteenth century, when covered wooden construction was the standard technology. The county lacked the industrial wealth to replace them with steel and concrete in the early twentieth century, so they survived. At one point there were as many as fifty-three covered bridges in the county. Twenty-two have been lost to floods, fires, and demolition. The thirty-one remaining span streams across a landscape of rolling farmland and timber lots.

Every October, Parke County holds the Covered Bridge Festival, one of the largest outdoor festivals in Indiana, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors who come to see structures that most of the country demolished a century ago. The bridges are on the National Register of Historic Places and are actively maintained by the county.

Driving across one of them, you hear the planks under your wheels and catch a smell of old timber, and for a moment the nineteenth century is less than an arm's length away.