A Bridge Out of Place

This column originaly apeared on Sunday, April 6, 2008

There are a few things that strike you as if not out of place, then certainly just this side of odd when you travel west from West Chester on Route 842 into the wilds of East Bradford.

The first is the house with the large window behind which sits a chair and a bicycle in perfect repose opposite one another. You cannot be certain if these items are there on display, or whether the homeowner put them there months ago and has just simply forgotten them, or whether he or she sits down in the chair every now and then and contemplates going for a quick jaunt on the bike while the afternoon traffic passes by.

The second is the rusted piece of what looks to be old farm equipment along the roadside past the old Gun Club. You wonder when it was last used. What was it used for? Was threshing involved? Is it there for display purposes as well, or has the landowner been so lazy over the years that he or she can’t get around to removing it?

But for my money what stands out the most as an anachronism is the bridge over the East Branch of the Brandywine at Allerton Road.

Do not mistake what I am saying. It is a picturesque bridge, and not at all without its charms. Casey Stengel used to say that every baseball manager wants a bridge to jump off every now and then, and I think he would have enjoyed doing so here. He’d have gotten wet, but would have likely walked away none worse the wear from the plunge.

The bridge is a steel Pratt Truss bridge, painted a light shade of aquamarine, and spans about 105 feet of the Brandywine in the shadow of the Blue Rock Farm. According to the clutter of signs that line the road on its approach, the bridge can handle a weight of 8 tons, and has a clearance of 12 feet 1 inch. It was built about 1905, I learned, and if you want to look it up in Pennsylvania’s list of bridges, you’d be advised to check No. 15701504380111.

It is rated as “functionally obsolete.”

It is, as I said, a pretty bridge, but to my mind wholly out of place. The bridges of East Bradford should be made of stone, like Cope’s Bridge, or wood, like Gibson’s Covered Bridge. You want your scenery in a place like East Bradford to fit snugly, like a stone barn into a green embankment.

The bridge does not have a name, so far as I can tell. If it did, it would likely be the Jefferis Ford Bridge, since its location is the point of the Brandywine where Cornwallis found the creek sufficiently shallow enough to cross on his way to routing Washington in the Battle of the Brandywine. The sign that tells you this also notes that Cornwallis made his crossing between “1 and 2 o’clock.” No one has ever established exactly how many of Washington’s soldiers were killed on Sept. 11, 1777.

The bridge was not there that afternoon, of course. Nor were the five horses that now dot the pasture on the west side of the creek, nor the fences that line the pasture, nor the barn that the horses came from. All that remains of when Cornwallis and his troops crossed over is the rippling sound of the Brandywine, which is always exactly where it is supposed to be.