Parke County Covered Bridges: Home of Indiana’s Famous Covered Bridge Festival
Folks come out in droves to shop, eat funky food, check out local arts and crafts, and admire these iconic bridges. The first covered bridge in Parke County was built in 1856, and at one point there were as many as 53 of them across the county. They needed all these bridges to navigate a landscape that was rutted by massive glaciers in the last ice age.
“As the glaciers traveled south into our area, the glaciers were acting like bulldozers. They were pushing mounds and mounds of debris. As those glaciers began to recede, they just left those piles of dirt. That's where we are. It's called a terminal or the end, the terminal moraine. So as a result, we have these big mounds. Between those mounds or the valleys, we have just hundreds and hundreds of creeks and little rivers,” says Jim Meese, Parke County Commissioner.
“Most of them were built alongside mills, because otherwise, if you had a mill that was built along a little spot in the creek, you could only travel at certain times of the year when the water was down,” Meese explains. “It was really important for those towns to have access across the creek all year long. And as a result, there was a mill, and then typically came a bridge, and then typically the towns began to grow up around that because people could get there and do their economic activity every day.”
The History of Covered Bridges in Indiana
The bridges were so important to the local economy, they covered them to keep the structure safe and dry.
“If you had all this wood exposed to the elements, it's going to rot a lot quicker. They certainly wouldn't last 150 years,” says Rhonda Montgomery, Tourism Specialist at Parke County Inc.
“Those covered bridges have survived mainly because it wasn't a very rich county, and so we didn't tear them down. As technology came for new concrete and steel bridges, we didn't tear down perfectly good bridges 150 years ago. We kept them going,” states Meese. “It's really important to us, to those people, and that allowed our country to grow into what it is today.”
Today, the Covered Bridge Festival is an epic celebration of the bridges and Parke County that brings people back year after year.
Montgomery notes, “We expect about 2 million people to come into our county for the ten day festival, and it's very exciting because you see people come back year after year. This is now a tradition with their family.”
One visitor says, “We come every year. It’s so much fun, good to see people come back to the same shops and greet some people. That's a really fun time.”
“Ever since I was young, I've been coming here, watching it grow. I try to make a yearly tradition of it, come home for the festival. I like seeing all the handmade stuff, you know?” says another visitor.
A visitor adds, “Oh, gosh, it's a must-have to go around to all the shops, the little mom-and-pop places and meeting people that you haven't seen and little handcrafted items that you can't get anywhere else.”
Artists of the Covered Bridge Festival
Starting on the second Friday in October, artists, woodworkers and crafters fanned out across nine different towns to sell their goods and display their art. Many of these artists and craftspeople are staples of the long-running festival, like Blaine Berry, who's been coming here for years to show off his work and demonstrate his process.
“I do it pretty much basically the same way they did back those days. The main thing I do is old style Windsor chairs. I do stuff from the late 1700s to the early 1800s,” says Berry, a woodworker.
Berry’s work has caught the eye of the experts at the Smithsonian, where this chair will be on display starting next summer.
Many of the artists whose work you see at the festival are from right here in Parke County, like painter Lynne Dunnavant. She says, “When I come to the bridges, I feel like I'm home because it's part of my life and my history.”
She paints a number of different subjects, but she always seems to return to the covered bridges, a passion that she has shared with the folks who flock to the festival every year.
“A lot of times I think [the reason] people are drawn to them and like them is because when they come back for the festival, they may say, ‘oh, I remember this bridge and I grew up here.’ They like to buy the bridges because they lived it also, and it's a memory for them,” explains Dunnavant.
Dunnavant’s work is shown at the Covered Bridge Art Gallery in Rockville, alongside bridge paintings by many other local artists.
Adds Dunnavant, “We have so many great artists in our county, and some of the members have been doing art since the festival started.”
The paintings at the gallery, just like the bridges themselves, are windows to the past that help folks in Parke County tell their story in bright, vivid colors.
“I think it's important that people understand our history here in Parke County and how proud we are,” concludes Montgomery.
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The above video is a clip from Journey Indiana from WTIU. You can watch more segments and full episodes at pbs.org/show/journey-indiana/
