Union Covered Bridge State Historic Site

Monroe County gave permission on April 8, 1870, for a bridge over the Elk Fork of the Salt River, after two earlier bridges at the crossing had failed. Joseph Elliott built it of local oak for $5,500 on the road between Paris in Monroe County and Fayette in Howard County, two towns of the hemp and tobacco country later called Little Dixie, and it opened on September 17, 1871. It took its name from Union Church nearby.

It is a Burr-arch truss, the only one among Missouri's four surviving covered bridges; the other three are Howe trusses. Two arches on each side work with a row of king posts to carry the deck, the parts are pinned with wooden treenails and a few iron fasteners, and the bridge bows slightly upstream to steady it in floods. Under its board siding and shingle roof it looks like a barn, and local legend says that is why livestock would walk through it.

It was nearly lost to neglect in the 1960s. In 1967 the legislature brought the state's covered bridges into the park system, and that same year a flood tore away siding, so the 1968 repairs used timbers from the Mexico Covered Bridge, which the flood had destroyed. It closed to cars in 1970, the year it was listed on the National Register, survived the Great Flood of 1993, and was damaged again in 2008. Repairs were finished in 2019.