The Langley Covered Bridge near Centreville

Three miles up a quiet road from Centreville, the pavement runs into a wooden tunnel over the St. Joseph River. At 282 feet, the Langley Covered Bridge is the longest covered bridge left standing in Michigan, and you can still drive through it.

The bridge that’s there now went up in 1887, named for Thomas Langley and his family, who settled near Centreville in the early days. Its skeleton is a Howe truss — a frame of wood beams stiffened with iron rods, a design patented in the 1840s that could leap a wide river in a handful of long segments. The roof and walls weren’t for charm. They’re an umbrella for the deck: keep the rain and snow off the timber and a covered bridge will outlive an open one by decades, which is the whole reason any of these survived to be photographed.

It has been a fussy survivor. When the Sturgis dam downstream backed the river up, crews had to jack the entire bridge higher to clear the rising water. More recently the county spent years rebuilding the steel underneath it, and the bridge reopened to cars in January 2024.

Go in autumn and you’ll usually find someone with a camera planted at the riverbank, waiting for the light to hit the dark planks just right. The deck is narrow — one lane, with the river glinting through the slats — so you slow down whether you mean to or not, which is about the only way to cross a hundred-and-thirty-year-old bridge anyway.