Trapp Creek Covered Bridge

After the floods that took out so many covered bridges in the 60’s photographers of all skill levels set out to catalog the remaining bridges. Luckily, that worked helped to save so many of these cool pieces of architecture. Glenn Gilbert Groff and his wife Nina Margaret Groff were two of those photographers.

Among their photographs is this Covered Bridge. Simply labeled “Unnamed Covered Bridge (Chitwood, Yaquina River.)

Chitwood #2 Bridge – Photo by Glenn Groff

I spent a lot of time looking at photos of this bridge believing it was just the Chitwood Bridge as they are the exact same, unique, design. But there are some huge differences, at the time the regular Chitwood bridge had the remains of Archie Pepin’s general store near it.

Chitwood Covered Bridge by Ben Maxwell showing Archie Pepin’s store in the back

As we can see, this one has a house visible on the other side of it. And the damage to the portal is different although that could have been fixed between these pictures. After all, the arch portals on many covered bridges were frequently angled off to reduce damage from log trucks.

But, I believe this bridge was actually down the road a mile where Trapp Creek Road meets Highway 20. It still crosses the Yaquina River and best of all if you look north from the existing bridge in Google Maps there is a remarkably similar house in the right place.

So based on that, I’m calling this the Trapp Creek Bridge. What do you all think? Does it look like the correct location? Better yet, do you have better photos of it, or know when it was removed?