Locust Creek: Missouri's Longest Covered Bridge on America's First Road

Near the small town of Laclede in Linn County, Missouri, a wooden covered bridge spans Locust Creek and holds a distinction that connects this quiet site to two remarkable chapters of American history: it is the longest surviving covered bridge in Missouri, and it once served as a crossing on a road promoted as the first transcontinental route in the United States.

The bridge was built in eighteen sixty-eight by the construction firm of Bishop and Eaton. On May nineteenth of that year, the Linn County Court authorized the project at a cost not to exceed five thousand five hundred dollars. The firm completed the job later that year, using white pine lumber and the Howe truss system, a design patented in eighteen forty by William Howe that combined wooden diagonal members with iron vertical rods, giving the truss a rigidity that made it popular for longer spans. When finished, the bridge measured one hundred fifty-one feet long, sixteen feet wide, and twenty feet high.

The road itself gained a new identity decades after the bridge was built. In the early twentieth century, this wagon road became part of Missouri Route Eight, a state highway that carried travelers until it was bypassed by the completion of United States Route Thirty-Six in nineteen thirty. Before that bypass, the covered bridge over Locust Creek served travelers moving along that corridor.

Only four covered bridges survive in Missouri today. Locust Creek is the longest of them. The Burfordville Covered Bridge in Cape Girardeau County is older. But in terms of sheer span, Locust Creek stands alone in the state.

The bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May nineteenth, nineteen seventy, exactly one hundred two years after the county court ordered it built. Missouri State Parks now manages the site, and the bridge still stands on its stone piers, a structure of nineteenth-century timber and hardware that has outlasted every vehicle and road that once crossed it.