The Germantown Covered Bridge has seen more movement than a unit on a forced march. Constructed in 1870 with an inverted bowstring design, the structure refused to stay put. In 1911, the bridge was hauled from its original position over Little Creek on the Dayton Pike and redeployed to East Center Street. It basically participated in a tactical relocation before it was even old.
It managed to hold the line through a 1963 restoration and maintained its rank on the National Register of Historic Places. That peace lasted until 1981 when a vehicle decided the bridge was an enemy combatant and wrecked it. The damage was so severe that the structure was officially kicked off the Register. It was a total tactical failure for the bridge.
Engineering is not about letting your equipment die. It is about salvage and recycling. Pieces of the bridge were recovered and used in a reconstruction that brought it back into service. However, the bridge was demoted to pedestrian-only status following the wreck. It is now a low-ranking structure for people on foot.
Today, you can march across it on East Center Street. It remains a documented piece of engineering history, officially recorded by the Historic American Engineering Record in 1992. It survived the chaos, even if it lost its high-level clearance.
Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons
Written by Kyle McLonely
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