The Arabia Bridge: Parke County's Shortest and Strangest

A short drive south of US Route Thirty-Six, along back roads through Parke County's creek-cut farmland, sits the Phillips Covered Bridge, and it is the odd one out in a county of covered bridges.

Built in nineteen oh nine by Joseph A. Britton, the Phillips bridge is the only covered bridge in Parke County that was not constructed using the Burr Arch method. Every other surviving covered bridge in the county employs the Burr Arch truss, a nineteenth-century design that combines an internal kingpost framework with a long arch to give the structure both flexibility and strength. The Phillips bridge uses only a simple kingpost configuration, making it structurally unique in this county. It is also the shortest covered bridge in Parke County, spanning just forty-three feet across Rocky Run, also known as Big Pond Creek.

Joseph Britton was the other great covered bridge builder in the county, working alongside J.J. Daniels in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Where Daniels built nine bridges in the county, Britton and his sons are credited with roughly forty bridges across three Indiana counties over a thirty-three-year career that began in eighteen eighty-two.

The bridge's popular name adds another layer of local color. It is almost universally called the Arabia Covered Bridge, because the surrounding area was known as Little Arabia. The origin of that nickname is uncertain. One account credits Syrian Muslim immigrants who settled nearby, while another says it was a derisive label for local residents.

The Phillips Bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-eight, the same year most of Parke County's surviving bridges received that designation. It stands as a reminder that even within a single county's inventory of historic bridges, there is room for the exception, the shortest span, the only kingpost, the bridge that goes by a name whose origin is still debated.