The State Sanatorium Covered Bridge

This single span Burr Arch Truss structure has a length of 154 feet, or 170 feet including the 8-foot overhang at each end, is 16 feet wide and 12 feet 6 inches high. Built in 1912 by Joseph A. Britton for the State Sanatorium with the specific purpose of providing access for transporting coal into the facility on a back road, this was the only Indiana covered bridge to have lightning rods.

The Sanatorium was sold to the Lee Alan Bryant Health Care Facilities, Inc., and the scope of this project included moving this structure to the site originally occupied by the Adam and then the Jessup Covered Bridges, that location is about one mile upstream from the original site.

CLR Inc. worked with Square and Level Construction company, in a joint effort to preserve the old structure. It was first picked off its old abutments and taken completely apart and transported, upstream to an open field near the new location and totally rebuilt, with about half of the wood being replaced with new timbers. While the bridge was being rebuilt in the nearby field, new abutments were constructed, driving 16 steel shell concrete filled piles approx. 40 feet each, into each abutment. Then new concrete was poured around the piling to the original specs of the old abutments. When both the abutments were completed and all the wood replaced in the bridge, the bridge was then moved across the creek and picked up by two large cranes and set in place on its new foundations. It is now being used once again

Ribbon cutting at the Sanatorium Covered Bridge