They were a transition between stone and metal bridges, with the roof and sides protecting the wooden structure from weather.

The United States Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration uses it as the model of a covered bridge "classic gable roof",[4] and it serves as the logo of a Pennsylvania insurance company.

[6][7] Forksville Covered Bridge is its official name on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP).

The name of the bridge comes from the community of Forksville, which is on land first settled in 1794, was laid out as a village in 1854, and was incorporated as a borough from part of Forks Township on December 22, 1880.

[3][13] Rogers built the Forksville and Hillsgrove bridges across Loyalsock Creek, with the latter about 5 miles (8.0 km) downstream of the former.

[2] According to the NRHP, the bridge's "road surface width" is 15 feet (4.6 m),[3] which is only sufficient for a single lane of traffic.

[17] Between about 1870 and 1890, logging in the Loyalsock Creek watershed produced lumber rafts that floated beneath the bridge.

These rafts, each containing 5,000–30,000 board feet (12–70 m3) of lumber, were carried down the Loyalsock to its mouth at Montoursville, and some continued on the West Branch Susquehanna River beyond.

[19] The bridge survived another major flood on November 16, 1926, when a dam broke upstream[20] but was "badly damaged" by an ice jam on January 23, 1959, in a flood that left blocks of ice weighing up to 500 pounds (230 kg) in the streets of Forksville.

[14][21] The Forksville Covered Bridge was restored in 1970 with what the NRHP nomination form describes as "all kinds of odd repairs".

The repair involved minor work on the "steel floor beams and stringers", which had been added years before.

[a] It found that the bridge's foundations were "determined to be stable for calculated scour conditions" but that the railing "does not meet currently acceptable standards".

[2] Its overall condition was deemed "basically intolerable requiring high priority of corrective action";[2] the 2006 NBI estimated the cost to improve the bridge at $463,000.

[2] The bridge is used as the logo of the Farmers & Mechanics Mutual Insurance Company, which was founded in Sullivan County in 1877.

"[5] The following table is a comparison of published measurements of length, width and load recorded by four different sources using different methods, as well as the name cited for the bridge and its builder.

The NBI measures bridge length between the "backwalls of abutments" or pavement grooves and the roadway width as "the most restrictive minimum distance between curbs or rails".

[6] The data in Zacher's book was based on a 1991 survey of all covered bridges in Pennsylvania by the PHMC and PennDOT, aided by local government and private agencies.