The Office Bridge (also called Westfir Covered Bridge) is a covered bridge in Westfir, Lane County, Oregon, U.S. crossing the North Fork Middle Fork Willamette River at the south end of the Aufderheide National Scenic Byway and edge of the Willamette National Forest. It is Oregon's longest covered bridge at 180 ft (55 m), and is one of only two in the state using triple Howe truss construction. It is the only covered bridge west of the Mississippi River which has a separate pedestrian walkway.
The bridge is a replacement for a 1941 bridge which washed away. It was built in 1944 by the Westfir Lumber Company to carry logging trucks and lumber trucks to the company's lumber mill and mill pond. The company headquarters and offices were located across the river beside National Forest Development Road 19, in what is now a bed and breakfast. The bed and breakfast retains the company's walk-in safe.
The company-owned town of Westfir, the mill, and the bridge were sold to an investment firm in 1977. The lumber mill burned to the ground in the early 1980s. In 1992 the bridge ownership changed to Lane County due to property tax foreclosure. Extensive structural work in 1993 stabilized the bridge. In 2002, the roof was replaced.
Formerly, the bridge was closed to public access. In about 2003, a small park was established on the north side of the bridge. The park also serves as a trailhead to North Fork Trail #3666, which follows the Wild and Scenic section of the North Fork river. The Wild and Scenic designation ends a few hundred feet upriver from the bridge.
Each Christmas season, the town decorates the bridge with lights. A firetruck driven by Santa turns the lights on the first week after Thanksgiving.
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Famous quotes containing the words office and/or bridge:
“So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can’t even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.”
—Russell Baker (b. 1925)
“Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it’s intimate and psychological—resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)