Winterset — Iowa | Shared Latitude

A Madison County courthouse town famous for its covered bridges and for producing John Wayne, where Lia and I got happily lost on gravel roads chasing red barns and white lattice trusses.

We came to Winterset with a paper map from the visitor center and a vague plan to find as many of Madison County’s covered bridges as we could before dark, and that turned out to be the perfect way to see this part of Iowa. The town itself sits around a handsome limestone courthouse square, the kind of place where the hardware store and the coffee shop still know each other’s business, but it’s the surrounding farmland — corn rows running to the horizon, gravel roads dipping into wooded creek bottoms — where Winterset actually reveals itself.

The covered bridges of Madison County

Six wooden covered bridges survive from the nineteenth century, built with sides and roofs mainly to protect the load-bearing trusses from Iowa’s weather, and each one sits down a different gravel spur that Lia navigated from the passenger seat while I drove too slowly over washboard roads. Roseman Bridge, the one made famous by the novel and film The Bridges of Madison County, draws the most visitors, its dim red-painted interior carved with decades of initials, but we preferred Cedar Bridge, rebuilt after an arson fire and standing nearly alone beside a quiet creek where we ate a picnic lunch on the tailgate.

A weathered red covered bridge spanning a creek in the Madison County countryside near Winterset, Iowa

John Wayne’s birthplace on the square

Back in town, a small white cottage a block off the courthouse square turned out to be the actual birthplace of Marion Morrison, better known as John Wayne, and the adjoining museum traces his path from this modest four-room house to Hollywood with a genuine, unpretentious pride rather than kitsch. We wandered the courthouse square afterward, its 1876 limestone building anchoring a ring of small shops, and had pie at a diner where the waitress asked, without irony, whether we’d found all six bridges yet — apparently a standard local question for anyone with mud on their shoes.

The limestone Madison County Courthouse anchoring the town square in Winterset, Iowa

Getting There

Winterset is about thirty-five minutes southwest of Des Moines International Airport (DSM) via Highway 92, making it an easy day trip or overnight from Iowa’s capital. A car is essential — the covered bridges are scattered across gravel roads throughout the county, and there’s no public transit linking them, but the drive itself, through rolling farmland, is a big part of the appeal.