The 1925 Pass Creek Bridge is a covered bridge in the city of Drain in Douglas County, Oregon. Originally, this 61-foot Howe truss span carried stagecoaches over Pass Creek before being moved a few hundred feet from its original location in 1987 and reassembled behind the Drain Civic Center. From 1987 through 2014, when the city closed the deteriorating bridge completely, it carried pedestrian traffic across Pass Creek, a tributary of Elk Creek in the Umpqua River basin.

Although the official date of construction of the bridge is listed as 1925, members of the Umpqua Historic Preservation Society say the bridge was built in 1906, according to the Oregon Department of Transportation. In either case, an even earlier bridge carried a covered wagon route over the creek at this same location. The route, an 1876 extension of the Overland Stagecoach, opened between Roseburg and Scottsburg near the Oregon Coast. Records from 1895 indicate a covered railroad bridge next to the covered stagecoach bridge. The rail bridge was used by the Oregon and California Railroad, later acquired by the Southern Pacific.

The 1925 bridge carried First Street over the creek downstream of its current location behind the civic center. By then, the railroad bridge next to it was a steel truss structure built in 1906. The 1925 Howe truss bridge had few notable architectural details and no windows, although it had cedar siding and some hand-hewn timbers likely recycled from an earlier bridge.

Mamie Krewson Matoon, who was born in 1894, remembered a covered bridge over Pass Creek as a child. "It was an old bridge at the time. Long before Drain had lights, we packed a lantern on nights when going through it in a hack drawn by two horses."

The original bridge at this site was built in the 1870s along the Overland Stage Route, as Drain was an important junction that linked the Willamette Valley and Jacksonville. An 1895-era photograph shows the wagon bridge and adjacent railroad bridge, both being covered.

Old-timers recall the Pass Creek Bridge being damaged when a horse-drawn wagon crashed through the floor around 1920 while hauling supplies for a Thanksgiving turkey shoot. Although the wagon dropped below the decking, the only casualties were the drowning turkeys and Thanksgiving supplies.

In the fall of 1987, after the roof and siding of the covered bridge were removed, a 90-ton crane lifted the trusses and moved them one block away, where the structure was reassembled the following year and remains today.

Located at:  N43 39.638   W123 19.002       -       WGCB #37-10-02

Photographed in May of 2025

Photos by Millard Farmer