The Red Oak Creek Covered Bridge

The last of the Horace King-built bridges in Georgia.

 From the 1840s to 1900 and even beyond, much of the traffic in the Deep South crossed its streams on wooden bridges built by the legendary Horace King, a master bridge builder who was actually a freed slave

The bridge over Red Oak Creek was built by King in the 1840s. It's Georgia’s oldest covered bridge, and at 391 feet, the longest, if one includes the approaches. The covered portion is about 140 feet long, using Town lattice construction with criss-crossed planks held together by approximately 2,500 wooden pegs. This is the last of King's bridges still in use in Georgia.

If you should happen to visit Albany, Georgia be sure to visit the Bridge House on Front Street, which King built in 1858, along with a bridge over the Flint River. The bridge was swept away by a flood in 1897, but the Bridge House still stands and is now the centerpiece of Riverfront Park and serves as Albany's Welcome Center.  

To get to the Red Oak Creek covered bridge, a good place to start is the courthouse square in Fayetteville. Go south 27 miles on GA 85 to the one-stoplight village of Gay. Nothing much happens in Gay, except on the first full weekends in May and October, in which case you may find yourself in the middle of a traffic jam as thousands flock to the Gay Cotton Pickin' Fair, an arts, crafts, and antiques festival on the old Gay family farm. An institution that dates back to 1972, the Cotton Pickin' Fair is one of the Southeast Tourism Society's Top Twenty Events.

From Gay, continue south on GA 85 for about five miles to the well-marked intersection with Covered Bridge Road on your left. Red Oak Creek Covered Bridge is about a mile back, and, unlike many old bridges, you can still drive on it.

(This is just one part of Tour Three, which you can read about and follow if you like, in my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia, now in its second edition. The covered bridge photo was made with an Olympus OMD-E-M5 digital camera, a delightfully small but very precise piece of equipment about the same size as my all-time favorite, the Olympus OM-2n film camera.) 

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone