My husband and I are addicted to back road drives. We find the neatest things. The other day we ended up on a dirt road out of Zephyr. There is an old iron bridge on this road that is pretty evocative. I love old bridges because they are usually built to accommodate early roadways, some maybe even older than we know. After all, the easiest way to cross a body of water probably has a long history that goes beyond any of our records.
This bridge is what is called a pony truss bridge, defined by Google like so: “A pony truss is a truss bridge which allows traffic through the truss, but the top of the bridge is not joined together with cross braces. Example of a real pony truss bridge: Any truss bridge can be a pony truss. But not many are being made anymore, so chances are small that you will actually see one.” We did, however, see one!
This little bridge crosses over the currently dry Blanket Creek. It is 61 feet long (doesn’t look like it, but that is what they say), and was built in 1936. According to information from a historical marker that was once there, and has apparently been stolen, the original location of the town of Zephyr was along the creek, near the bridge. The early town existed there from 1863 to 1885. There was a store, a post office and 17 families lived along the creek near the bridge.
I like to think there is something left in an area from the people who have lived there going back generations. Maybe some kind of lingering conglomeration of the events of the lives of those people defines the ‘feel’ of a site. This site has a good feel to me. I can almost see the laid back bustle of the sparse early townspeople. On a brisk sunny day, they’d be about their business.
The day we drove over the bridge was a clear, cool day, with the promise of spring in the air. I can almost see it as it must have been one hundred and fifty years ago. A man is driving an old cart,pulled by a pony of course, filled with firewood over the old iron bridge, clucking to his old nag to get along. He waves to the townspeople. They wave back. It is not going to be a hard winter. I don’t know. It feels like a happy place to me, somewhere where people came to escape all kinds of hardships along the east coast or from other countries, and found for themselves a life full of opportunities in Texas.
I am glad we took that drive. While my husband sometimes takes the wrong turns, and we end up wandering around without any idea where we were heading, I think there is never a drive that doesn’t result in something worth seeing. Finding the old iron bridge was sure one of those drives.
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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns and articles appear periodically on BrownwoodNews.com
