08/25/2026
Just one of the many fall attractions/activities along the lake to enjoy when staying at Beachglass Landing! Coming up next after Labor Day is the Rib Burn-Off, Sept 18-20, at Ashtabula’s Lakeshore Park w fireworks on Saturday night! All seasons are just better at the Lake!!
🌉 Ashtabula County built the longest covered bridge in the United States in 2008, which is not a sentence most people expect to read.
The Smolen Gulf Bridge carries a county road over the Ashtabula River gorge at a length of roughly six hundred feet, about a hundred feet above the water. It was designed by the county engineer, John Smolen, and it exists because the old crossing needed replacing and the county decided that if it was going to spend the money anyway, it might as well build something people would drive out of their way to see. A few years later they built another one nearby, a pedestrian span, essentially because they could.
That corner of Ohio has close to twenty covered bridges, more than almost anywhere else in the country, and they are not all museum pieces behind a rope. Plenty of them carry real traffic on real township roads. You come around a bend on gravel in October with the maples going and there is a barn red bridge from the 1860s sitting in front of you, and then two miles later there is another one.
Have you driven the Ashtabula County covered bridge route, and which bridge is the one actually worth stopping for?
