Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 8, 2015

The Hillsgrove Covered Bridge, a 186-foot (57 m) one-lane bridge with a roof and sides to protect the wooden structure from the weather, crosses Loyalsock Creek in Hillsgrove Township, Sullivan County, in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. Built by Sadler Rodgers around 1850 and serving as a landing site for lumber rafts between 1870 and 1890, it has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1973. Nineteenth-century regulations restricting speed, number of animals, and fire are still posted on the bridge. It gets its strength and rigidity from load-bearing Burr arches sandwiching multiple vertical king posts on each side. Restoration work was carried out in 1963, 1968, 2010, and, after serious flood damage (pictured), again in 2012. The bridge was still in use in 2015, and its average daily traffic was 54 vehicles in 2012, but the same year, the National Bridge Inventory found the bridge to be "Structurally Deficient" despite the restorations, with problematic railings and a 16.5 percent structural sufficiency rating. Only three of the 30 covered bridges that were in Sullivan County in 1890 remain in 2015: Forksville, Hillsgrove, and Sonestown. Pennsylvania had the first covered bridge in the United States, and has had more of them than any other state since the mid-19th century. (Full article...)

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