The Holz Brucke Covered Bridge

Crossing the Cass River near the Bavarian Inn is a wooden covered bridge that looks like it has stood for a century and a half. It has not. The Holz Brucke, German for wooden bridge, was completed around the turn of nineteen eighty, but it was built to look like the covered bridges of the eighteen hundreds.

It was the idea of Tiny Zehnder, the same Bavarian Inn leader who reshaped so much of the town. As Frankenmuth boomed in the late nineteen seventies, Zehnder needed more parking across the river, and rather than throw up a plain concrete span he wanted something that honored the town's old world craftsmanship. The most memorable detail is how they set it in place.

In January of nineteen eighty the enormous timber structure, was pulled across the river with a capstan and pulleys. The finished bridge runs about two hundred thirty nine feet long. Today it carries visitors between the two halves of the resort and has become one of Frankenmuth's most photographed landmarks, a piece of deliberate old world theater that has aged into a genuine local icon.