Sandy Creek Covered Bridge State Historic Site

Sandy Creek Covered Bridge State Historic Site in Jefferson County, Missouri, is administered by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources' Division of State Parks to preserve the Sandy Creek Covered Bridge. The bridge is one of four remaining covered bridges in Missouri, which once numbered about 30. It is a relatively rare example of a Howe truss bridge, one of three in Missouri. It is named for Sandy Creek which it crosses.

Jefferson county embarked on a building program following the American Civil War and paid John H. Morse $2000 for the construction of Sandy Creek Covered Bridge in 1872. It is one of six bridges built that year for Hillsboro to Lemay Ferry road to connect the county seat of Hillsboro to St. Louis County. It was destroyed by high water in 1886, and was rebuilt for $899 by Henry Steffin using half of the original timbers and the original abutments. The bridge is 74.5-foot (22.7 m), 18 feet 10 inches (5.7 m) wide and an height of 13-foot (4.0 m).

The bridge came under the protection of the state parks system when the state legislature passed an act in 1967 declaring all remaining covered bridges in the state to be state historic sites. Jefferson County released the bridge to the state in 1968, and it was officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. A major restoration project restored the bridge to its original appearance in 1984.

The bridge is now open only to pedestrian traffic. The parks-administered historic site of which it is the centerpiece is a 205-acre (0.83 km2) day use facility with picnic tables, toilet facilities, and an interpretive display.

Read more about Sandy Creek Covered Bridge State Historic Site:  See Also

Famous quotes containing the words sandy, creek, covered, bridge, state, historic and/or site:

    Let a man get up and say, “Behold, this is the truth,” and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.
    Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

    The only law was that enforced by the Creek Lighthorsemen and the U.S. deputy marshals who paid rare and brief visits; or the “two volumes of common law” that every man carried strapped to his thighs.
    State of Oklahoma, U.S. relief program (1935-1943)

    While the body’s life, deep as a covered well,
    Instinctive as the wind, busy as May,
    Burns out a secret passageway to hell.
    Allen Tate (1899–1979)

    London Bridge is broken down,
    Dance o’er my lady lee,
    London Bridge is broken down,
    With a gay lady.
    How shall we build it up again?
    Dance o’er my lady lee,
    —Unknown. London Bridge (l. 1–6)

    Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why—but the editorialists forget it—terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.
    John Berger (b. 1926)

    Never is a historic deed already completed when it is done but always only when it is handed down to posterity. What we call “history” by no means represents the sum total of all significant deeds.... World history ... only comprises that tiny lighted sector which chanced to be placed in the spotlight by poetic or scholarly depictions.
    Stefan Zweig (18811942)

    It is not menstrual blood per se which disturbs the imagination—unstanchable as that red flood may be—but rather the albumen in the blood, the uterine shreds, placental jellyfish of the female sea. This is the chthonian matrix from which we rose. We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, our site of biologic origins. Every month, it is woman’s fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.
    Camille Paglia (b. 1947)