Terms | Truss Types | Locating Indiana Covered Bridges | Bridge Builders | Bridge Listing

locating indiana covered bridges

One of the newest Internet tools for finding places is Google Earth ... not only can you see satellite "birds-eye-views" of places, you can also get detailed driving directions that when printed provide pictures of the intersections!!!

To get started, you first need to download a viewer to your computer (this is just like when you download Adobe Acrobat Reader) ... to start, click the button below and then come back to this page after you are finished with the install.

---

Now that you have the viewer, you will be able to open a special file that I made and posted online for anyone interested in Indiana Covered Bridges to use so they can see and find their favorite bridge.

When you click on the link (it's at the bottom of this page but read on so you know how to use the information), Google Earth will open and zoom in on one of the Indiana covered bridges ... if you were to zoom in and out, you would be able to find all the bridges marked on the map and, if you were looking in Putnam County, you might see the following page:

While it's always kind of fun to just explore on your own by zooming around, you may notice that on the left side of the screen the bridges are listed by county ... if you are interested in a particular bridge, say for instance Houck (circled in red above), you can double click on the blue text and you will see the following page:

The first thing you'll see is a page telling about the bridge with a picture and "behind" this page, you'll notice that the screen seems to have shifted and zoomed in on something ... if you click the little "x" in the right hand corner of the description page that is covering the map image, you will be looking right down on the Houck Covered Bridge! If you wanted to get driving directions to this bridge, you could click on the blue text (circled in red above) that says "To here" ... if you do, you'll see the following page:

The white information box closed so now you can "see" the Houck Covered Bridge ... but notice that in the upper left corner of the screen a "Directions" box has opened and the "To" information has been filled in ... you can enter a starting address in the "From" box (circled in red above) and either press your keyboard "Enter" key or point at the little spyglass next to the "To" information and click ... the following page will be displayed:

The route is marked on the map and you are given turn-by-turn directions ... you can write all this down if you want to, but if you want to print it instead, click on the little printer icon (circled in red above) and ask to print the most recent diving directions. You'll get a fantastic map with pictures of each intersection.

Perhaps one of the most interesting features of Google Earth is that you can pick one of the bridges on the map to be the "To" and a different bridge to be the "From" so you can get directions from bridge to bridge.

Please note that all locations were determined using the current Indiana Atlas & Gazetter, published by DeLorme.

click here to open my Indiana Covered Bridge file on Google Earth