Photograph of Cataract Falls Covered Bridge — Photograph by Nyttend, Public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Cataract Covered Bridge

Built in 1876. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.

From the record

“The Cataract Falls Covered Bridge is a covered bridge that spans Mill Creek in Lieber State Recreation Area, Owen County, Indiana, United States. Built in 1876 by the Smith Bridge company of Toledo, Ohio, it was at one time one of the most famous and photographed covered bridges in the United States.”
Wikipedia article Cataract Falls Covered Bridge, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of 17 National Register listings published here for Owen County · listed in 2005 · category: Structure · built in 1876.

Sources: the Wikipedia article · the case file at the National Archives · the National Register database, National Park Service

The listing

What is counted as historic. The nomination lists 1 structure as contributing to the listing.
Address. Jct. of Cty Rte. 235W and Cty Rte 1000N over Mill Creek in Leiber State Recreation Area, Cataract, 47460
When was it listed? April 2005
Category. structure
Township. Jennings township
When was it built? 1876
National Register reference number. 05000339 - the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.

Storms near this property

3 since 1998

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The National Weather Service names Cataract, the town this property stands in, in 3 storm reports between 1998 and 2005: 2 thunderstorm wind, 1 flood. No death or injury is recorded in these reports. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date opens the federal record of that event.

When	Event	Place named	Harm	What the report says
August 2000	Thunderstorm Wind	Cataract	$50,000	no account filed
May 2005	Thunderstorm Wind	Cataract	-	Trees were downed near Cataract.
May 1998	Flood	Cataract	-	no account filed

Every storm recorded in Owen County

Map coverage status

No historic map-sheet match is published for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary. Browse the county's mapped places while that work is pending.

Sources for this property

National Archives record	The nomination case file for reference 05000339 in Record Group 79.
Wikipedia article	Community-written account of this property, licensed CC BY-SA.
Owen County	All 17 listed properties in this county.

Provenance

Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.