The original bridge was built in 1881 by Asa Hugill, a regional bridge builder who knew the multiple-kingpost truss design well - a system of vertical posts radiating from a central kingpost, supported by diagonal braces. The result was a span 75 feet long, with a roadway width of 14.25 feet, wide enough for a single team and wagon at a time. Hugill chose timber because timber was what the Harrison County hills supplied in abundance, and because a well-roofed wooden bridge could outlast an unprotected one by generations. The covering was practical, not romantic. Without a roof, snow, rain, and sun would have rotted the deck and trusses within a couple of decades. Covered, the same wood could last for over a century - as Simpson Creek has proven.

Eight years after Hugill finished the bridge, Simpson Creek rose in a way the builders had not anticipated. The July 1889 flood washed the bridge from its original site. Rather than abandon the structure or build a new one, the community salvaged what they could and relocated the bridge to higher ground, about half a mile upstream. There are very few covered bridges in America that have been moved at all, and even fewer that were moved because a flood had already done part of the moving. The relocation worked. The bridge has survived every subsequent flood, freshet, and ice jam Simpson Creek has thrown at it. The roof and siding have been replaced multiple times. The trusses underneath are largely the originals Hugill cut and pegged in 1881.

Harrison County once had several covered bridges, the way most West Virginia counties did before the automotive age. Iron, steel, and concrete made wooden covered bridges obsolete almost as quickly as the railroad did, and most were torn down or simply rotted away. Today, Simpson Creek and the Fletcher Covered Bridge are the only two left in Harrison County - both examples of the multiple-kingpost truss design that Hugill and his peers favored. The bridge is now an oddity rather than a necessity. Drivers on Meadowbrook Road slow to drive through it not because they have to, but because it is the kind of moment that makes a commute briefly feel like a postcard.

By the late 1990s, time was catching up with the bridge again. The deck was tired, the siding was weathered, and the paint was peeling. In the fall of 2001, the West Virginia Division of Highways spent nearly $400,000 to renovate Simpson Creek. The repairs included a new timber deck, new wooden exterior siding, and a fresh coat of paint - the kind of work that keeps a 19th-century bridge functional for 21st-century traffic. The improvements were not glamorous, and most drivers who crossed the bridge afterward probably did not notice exactly what had been replaced. That is the goal of good covered-bridge restoration: invisibility. The bridge keeps looking the way it has looked for generations, even as its parts quietly cycle through.