Irish Bend Covered Bridge No. 14169 Corvallis, Oregon

Text courtesy of the National Register of Historic Places, a program of the National Parks Service. Minor transcription errors or changes in formatting may have occurred; please see the Nomination Form PDF for official text. Some information may have become outdated since the property was nominated for the Register.

The Irish Bend Covered Bridge is an excellent example of a covered Howe-truss timber bridge, a form the Oregon State Highway Department developed in the 1920's-1930's as a standardized plan that the Department and individual counties used to improve the design and construction quality of their bridges. It is significant under Criterion C for its engineering design, at the state level, as documented in the 1979 Oregon Covered Bridges Thematic Nomination. 1 The 1954 construction date of the bridge is unusual as a late date for this type of bridge construction (a covered truss) and for its use of materials (timber), but remains a good representative example of its type. Today it is one of fifty-six surviving examples of the estimated 450 covered timber truss bridges that once existed in Oregon. Benton County built the Irish Bend Covered Bridge over the Willamette Slough in rural Benton County in 1954. In 1988, thirteen (13) years after a modern structure bypassed the bridge in 1975, the county dismantled the bridge, stored it for one year, and after a lengthy process to find the bridge a new home subsequently reassembled the bridge in Corvallis on the campus of Oregon State University in 1989. The dismantling of the bridge by the County in 1988 initiated its removal from listing in the National Register. The bridge relocation meets Criterion Exception B as the bridge's current bucolic setting is similar to its original setting. The bridge retains integrity of design, materials, workmanship, and feeling, as the bridge reassembly follows the original plan design and utilized the majority of the bridge's original materials.