Qualla: Staats Mill Covered Bridge

Staats Mill Covered Bridge: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Youngamerican (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Jackson County paid one thousand seven hundred eighty-eight dollars and thirty-five cents to build it. That was the exact figure the county court entered in the 1887 ledger, the cost of nearly a hundred feet of trussed timber framed by local craftsmen across the Tug Fork of Big Mill Creek, next to Enoch Staats' water-powered mill. For close to a century, the Staats Mill Covered Bridge carried wagons, then Model Ts, then pickups across the creek, its trapezoidal silhouette a fixed point in the landscape of rural West Virginia. Then in 1983, the county did something unusual: it lifted the entire bridge, hauled it three miles, and rebuilt it across a pond at a youth camp, where it still stands today, no longer carrying cars but instead carrying a kind of memory.

Image: Youngamerican (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Staats Mill Covered Bridge: The Long Truss

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Youngamerican (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Staats Mill bridge is one of the better surviving examples of the Long truss, a wooden bridge-building system patented in 1830 by Major Stephen H. Long of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The system is recognizable by its X-braced diagonals inside each panel - the verticals ...

Image: Youngamerican (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Staats Mill Covered Bridge: The Staats Family and the Mill

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Youngamerican (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Staats family arrived in this part of what was then Virginia around 1780, just after the Revolution opened the trans-Allegheny country to settlement. Over the next century they built a mill, a store, and the small commercial cluster that the bridge served. Enoch Staats' water...

Image: Youngamerican (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Staats Mill Covered Bridge: Listed, Lifted, Rebuilt

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Youngamerican (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, recognizing it as a rare surviving example of Long-truss construction in the state. By then it had been showing its age for decades. Rather than condemn it or rebuild it in place over the original creek, Ja...

Image: Youngamerican (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Staats Mill Covered Bridge: Why It Matters

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Youngamerican (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Of the hundreds of covered bridges that once dotted West Virginia, only seventeen survive. Each one represents a small civic decision made in the nineteenth century - a county court appropriating a few thousand dollars to make a creek crossable - and a much larger twentieth-centu...

Image: Youngamerican (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Staats Mill Covered Bridge: Flying Over the Foothills

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Youngamerican (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. From the air, the bridge is small - a single dark rectangle of cedar shingles set in the green grounds of the Cedar Lakes camp, three miles southwest of Ripley. The Tug Fork of Big Mill Creek, the bridge's original home, winds through pasture and woodlot a few minutes' drive nort...

Image: Youngamerican (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0