The Crow’s Mill Covered Bridge in the 1920s or ‘30s. The photograph, recovered from the internet by Noah Sabich (see below), is undated and unlabeled. However, the Springfield Dry Goods Co., whose advertising sign is at the peak of the roof, didn’t open until 1919. The other businesses whose signs are readable were in business well before then (and one, Lavely and Saunders, closed in 1908). SangamonLink identified the bridge as the Crow’s Mill Bridge by comparing this photo to labeled photographs in the Sangamon Valley section at Lincoln Library. The archway construction was unique to the Crow’s Mill bridge. (Public domain)
Sangamon County still had a half-dozen covered bridges at the start of the 1930s, more than any other county in the state of Illinois. By the time the decade ended, only two remained.
The first of the bridges to fall spanned the South Fork of the Sangamon River near New City. Aside from being dilapidated and unsafe, it flooded regularly, county highway superintendent Truman Flatt said when the bridge was torn down in October 1930. A concrete-and-steel bridge, sited two feet higher, replaced the New City covered bridge.
The Crow’s Mill covered bridge, pictured above, crossed Horse Creek just east of today’s Henson Robinson Zoo. It was demolished about 1937.
Already a century ago, covered bridges had become romantic relics of “the old days,” and for some people, the “romance” was literal. Longtime Illinois State Register editor V.Y. Dallman had a particular soft spot for covered bridges, apparently because he had found them enticing spots to woo his future wife, Marie Poston Dallman (1881-1959).
“Emanuel Salzenstein furnished us with fine horses and buggies to take our baby dolls to the covered bridges over Sugar Creek and South Fork,” Dallman wrote in a 1930 remembrance column.
Dallman joined a committee in 1937 that tried to preserve another South Fork covered bridge, this one on the Clear Lake Road seven miles east of Springfield. Many area residents apparently had fond memories of that bridge, which they had to cross to reach a picnic area known as Glenwood Park.
“That was the open sesame to the famous old recreation spot, which attracted so many picnickers and recreation-seekers from the city during the hot summers of the Nineties and later,” a Register photo caption said in 1939. By then, however, Glenwood Park was “merely a wooded section of a farm,” the newspaper said.
The Clear Lake Bridge committee lost its preservation bid in short order.
“It seems that the committee has been standing at one end of the bridge defending it like Horatius, while the contractors have been creeping up behind us and removing it under our very eyes, plank by plank,” committee chairman John Snigg told the Register in November 1937.
At least one other covered bridge, this one spanning Lick Creek near (or perhaps under) Lake Springfield, was demolished sometime in the ’30s. Its exact location is unclear, but a vague newspaper reference suggests it had been abandoned some years before it was torn down.
Two covered bridges remained standing in Sangamon County after 1937. One west of Springfield took County Road 5.5W over Spring Creek just north of Washington Street; it was destroyed by a suspected arsonist in December 1977. The road it was on was later renamed Old Covered Bridge Lane.
As of 2025, the county’s last covered bridge crosses Sugar Creek near Glenarm. Rebuilt and restored with the help of the Sangamon County Historical Society and other organizations, it has been closed to vehicles for 40 years. The Sugar Creek bridge is the centerpiece of a small park owned by the Chatham Park District. (The Sugar Creek bridge also is depicted in the historical society’s logo, which is displayed at the end of every SangamonLink entry — including this one.)
Hat tip: To Noah Sabich, who alerted SangamonLink to the Crow’s Mill bridge photo. Sabich, formerly of Springfield, is a business consultant and co-producer of “Soil and Soul,” a film and exhibit exploring the history of farming in Sangamon County.
More from SangamonLink
- Covered bridges (GenealogyTrail information) Suggests Sangamon County was home to about 30 covered bridges over two centuries.
- Spring Creek Covered Bridge fire “The sense of antiquity is strong along Spring Creek …”
- Sugar Creek Covered Bridge Located a few hundred yards from the first European settlement in Sangamon County.
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