Bridge stolen in New Castle, PA -- no, really! I'm not kidding!

Someone stole an entire bridge without anyone noticing.

This doesn't sound possible, but it happened in the New Castle area near Pittsburgh, PA. The bridge, said to be worth $100,000, just turned up missing at some point in the last 10 days.

Why did it take them so long to notice? Well, the bridge is called Coverts Crossing Bridge, so I guess the thieves were, well, covert! It is a little-used bridge, so it took a while for someone to notice.

Still, little-used or not, the fact that an entire bridge has been stolen is just amazing.

It was considered historical, and a group has even documented it. Here is an excerpt from the 2002 article:

Coverts Crossing Bridge

John W. Covert was a well-known physician from the New Castle area of Lawrence County born in 1837, and his short obituary mentions the ancestral Coverts coming from Holland. But according to Vidutis’ findings, little else has been recorded about the Coverts and their settlement of the land surrounding Coverts Crossing.

Although the area around Coverts Crossing has been populated by American Indians back to the Late Archaic and Late Woodland periods, the first Coverts Crossing Bridge was built in 1887 at Covert’s Ford by the Morse Bridge Co. of Youngstown, Ohio. Vidutis found that residents of Union, Mahoning and North Beaver Townships complained about frequent highway flooding that made travel to New Castle difficult. The result of these petitions was the first bridge that carried Covert Road over the Mahoning River.

This bridge became an important social and economic center in local farmers’ lives because of the nearby gristmill, the Cross-Cut Canal (part of the Pennsylvania Canal system) and the Lawrence Railroad stop called Coverts Station.

“Lawrence County documents suggest that the Coverts Crossing Bridge consists of two distinct bridge segments – a reused bridge at the south end and a newly erected one at the north end. This would explain the bridge’s apparent non-standardization, or mix, of design and construction,” Vidutis wrote in his comprehensive report.