Meems Bottom Covered Bridge: Burned and Rebuilt

The covered bridge at Meems Bottom crosses the North Fork of the Shenandoah River in Shenandoah County, and the structure you see today is technically the fourth bridge on this site. Floods took the first in eighteen seventy and the second in eighteen seventy-seven. The third bridge, built in eighteen ninety-four, lasted the longest. Workers quarried the limestone abutments nearby and cut the lumber from the adjacent farm of General G. S. Meems, for whom the crossing is named.

That eighteen ninety-four span stood for eighty-two years until Halloween night, nineteen seventy-six, when arsonists set it ablaze. Virginia officials salvaged what original timbers remained and rebuilt it in nineteen seventy-nine using traditional Burr arch truss construction. At two hundred and four feet, it is the longest standing covered bridge in Virginia, and one of only a handful still standing in the state.