Harpersfield Covered Bridge

The Harpersfield Covered Bridge has spanned the Grand River since eighteen sixty-eight, making it one of the oldest surviving covered bridges in Ohio. At two hundred twenty-eight feet it is Ohio's third longest, and the most photographed of the drivable covered spans in Ashtabula County, which calls itself the covered bridge capital of the Midwest.

The original bridge was a Howe truss, a design that sandwiched diagonal wooden timbers between vertical iron rods to carry wagon loads that would have snapped a simple beam. When the catastrophic statewide floods of nineteen thirteen washed out the land at one end, crews added a steel extension rather than tear down the wooden core, leaving the bridge a hybrid that still carries traffic today. A renovation in the early nineteen nineties added a pedestrian walkway alongside the driving lane. The bridge is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.