Please join us for the 52nd Annual Madison County Covered Bridge Festival, a yearly celebration of Madison County’s history, heritage and covered bridges, around the Winterset Courthouse Square. The festival features old-time craft demonstrations, a wide variety of festival food and arts & craft vendors, live music, children’s activities, an antique car show, a quilt show, a parade, and much more!

In addition to celebrating our ability to reunite on the second weekend in October, we look forward to celebrating one of our most important and influential citizens, George Stout. Well known in recent years due to his character’s role in the book and movie “The Monuments Men,” George Leslie Stout was an American art conservation specialist and museum director who founded the first laboratory in the United States to study art conservation, as well as the first journalist on the subject of art conservation. During World War II, he was a member of the U.S. Army unit devoted to recovering art, the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section (MFAA), a.k.a. “The Monuments Men. Stout was born in Winterset in 1897, and graduated from Winterset High School.