Kent County still has covered bridges (plural)

Twenty minutes from downtown Grand Rapids, you can still drive your car through a wooden bridge built when Ulysses Grant was president. Rural Kent County keeps Michigan’s richest collection of covered bridges: the Fallasburg Bridge of 1871, crossing the Flat River beside a preserved pioneer village north of Lowell (the sign still threatens a five-dollar fine for riding through faster than a walk); the Ada Covered Bridge of 1867 over the Thornapple, now a beloved footbridge at the heart of Ada’s village; and White’s Bridge near Smyrna, just over the line in Ionia County, an 1869 original lost to fire in 2013 and lovingly rebuilt by community fundraising — proof the tradition still has neighbors behind it.

The bridges mark the county’s quieter half: the Flat and Thornapple river valleys, where townships like Vergennes, Grattan, Cannon, and Bowne roll out in horse farms, orchards, and gravel-road autumn color that west Michigan drivers make annual pilgrimages for. Greater Grand Rapids gets the headlines; the covered-bridge townships are where it goes on Sunday afternoon.

A few practical notes: the Ada and Fallasburg bridges are both on the National Register of Historic Places and share the same sturdy wooden “Brown truss” design. The Ada bridge — barn-red and footbridge-only since heavy snow caved in its roof in 1979 and a later fire forced a rebuild (with help from hometown company Amway) — stands at 7490 Thornapple River Drive SE. The Fallasburg bridge, built by bridge-maker Jared Bresee and still one of the few historic covered bridges in Michigan you can drive a car across, sits in Fallasburg Park about five miles north of Lowell.