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The Old Alton Bridge
by Rick Moran
FATE :: December 2007

Denton County, Texas, once the epitome of the Wild West’s wide open spaces, is for the most part an extension of nearby Dallas’s urban sprawl today, covered with high-end single-family developments and occasional horse farms. The area, once the center of cattle drives, old Chisholm Trail cowboys, and wild gunfights between desperadoes and the outnumbered lawmen, has little to remind its new residents of those early days, but there are a few; one of which is the Old Alton Bridge, stretching its iron tendrils over the Hickory Creek, at a place where the infamous Sam Bass gang shot it out with a Texas Ranger patrol in the 1870s.

Alton was the original county seat of Denton, a short-lived claim to fame due to a falling water table that made potable water scarce, forcing local politicians to move to a new location in 1857. Today, Alton does not exist; not a building survives from the early days of the post-Republic conclave. The Alton Bridge was constructed many years after the collapse of the town that gave it its name, intended to carry traffic from the old postal road and Ranger patrol trail, over the Hickory Creek at a location that once was a popular ford for crossing cattle.

The bridge, built by King Iron & Bridge Co. in 1884, is a through-truss iron construction and first served the community’s horse and pedestrian traffic and later trucks and automobiles for the next 100 years, until the State of Texas deemed it unsafe for vehicle traffic in the 1970s. A new bridge was built adjacent to the old one in the early 1980s and the original was declared a National Historic Place in 1988 and later refurbished to carry horse and pedestrian traffic on what is now the Elm Fork Equestrian and Hiking Trail, in 1992. Today, the bridge is technically in the City of Copper Canyon, on the Pilot Knoll Trails, part of the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers park system; the bridge is now actively used by weekend cowboys on horseback, who can be heard talking to their stock brokers via cell phone while enjoying a ride in the woods, with joggers and hikers out for an afternoon trek close at hand.

While the true history of the bridge is interesting, it has also gained a reputation as a haunted place for as long as local residents can remember, always being the spot that kids would flock to on Halloween night in hopes of capturing a glimpse of a ghost who traversed the area late at night. The legend says that if you go to the bridge and honk your car horn twice at midnight, the ghost’s fiery red eyes will appear on the bridge. For several generations teenagers from as far away as Dallas and Fort Worth have traveled to the site, many later recounting stories about being scared away by unearthly sounds and unnatural shapes floating in the air.......Read the rest of this article exclusively in the December 2007 issue of FATE!

FATE Magazine: True Reports of the Strange and Unknown