Humpback Covered Bridge

The Humpback Covered Bridge west of Covington is the oldest surviving covered bridge in Virginia, built in eighteen fifty-seven on the old James River and Kanawha Turnpike. It earned its name from an unusual design: the hundred-foot single-span timber bridge rises four feet higher at its center than at either end, giving it a gentle arch that helped distribute wagon weight, one of only two cambered covered wooden bridges still standing in the United States.

This was not the first crossing here. Earlier bridges washed out in floods in eighteen thirty-seven, eighteen forty-two, and eighteen fifty-six. The current bridge carried traffic for over seventy years before a steel replacement opened in nineteen twenty-nine. A local civic campaign saved the wooden span from demolition, and it reopened as a public wayside in nineteen fifty-four, preserved as the piece of Alleghany Highlands history it is.