The story
Madison County Covered Bridge Festival in Winterset
Madison County Covered Bridge Festival is a two-day fall festival on the Winterset courthouse square, held the second full weekend of October since 1970. Built around the county's famous covered bridges made iconic by The Bridges of Madison County, it features 150-plus food and craft vendors, guided bridge bus tours, and Civil War reenactments at the Madison County Historical Complex.
Madison County Covered Bridge Festival began in 1970, organized by a group of local citizens in Winterset who recognized that the county's collection of nineteenth-century covered bridges, structures built with enclosed wooden lattice trusses to protect the bridge deck from weather, represented a genuinely distinctive piece of local heritage worth celebrating annually.