Stuckey's Bridge

Stuckey's Bridge carries a gravel county road over the Chunky River south of Meridian, Mississippi, and it comes with a story attached: a nineteenth-century highwayman named Stuckey who robbed and murdered travellers from an inn on the bank until a mob hanged him from the bridge that now bears his name. The story has a problem anyone can check in an afternoon. The bridge was built in 1901 by the Virginia Bridge & Iron Company of Roanoke, Virginia — the date taken from the Mississippi State Highway Department's bridge inventory, the builder read off the plaque bolted to the structure, both written down on the state's own survey form. No mob hanged anybody from it in the 1850s. The version most often printed goes further and makes Stuckey a member of the Dalton Gang, who rode in Kansas and Oklahoma in the early 1890s and were wiped out at Coffeyville in 1892. Mississippi's heritage file for the site — a Mississippi Landmark since 1984, on the National Register since 1988 — records a rare county truss and no outlaw at all. It is a fine place, and a clean example of a legend outliving its own dates.

Stuckey's Bridge carries a gravel county road over the Chunky River in southern Lauderdale County, Mississippi, about six miles south of Meehan and a short drive south-west of Meridian. It is a pin-connected metal through truss with a timber approach trestle and a wooden deck: roughly 199 feet long overall, with a main span of about 110 feet and a driving surface barely twelve feet wide, carried on concrete-filled metal caissons sunk into the riverbed. The state's own paperwork dates it precisely. When the Mississippi Department of Archives and History recorded the bridge, the historical archaeologist who filled in the form, Jack D. Elliott Jr., entered a date of construction of 1901 and a builder, the Virginia Bridge & Iron Company of Roanoke, Virginia. He also entered where each fact came from: the builder read off the plaque bolted to the bridge itself, the date taken from the bridge inventory kept by the Mississippi State Highway Department. Neither is an estimate. They are the two most ordinary and most reliable kinds of evidence a bridge can carry. That date is not an outlier either. Elliott surveyed Mississippi's historic bridges intermittently between January and October 1986, working from the Highway Department's computerised inventory and visiting, describing, drawing and photographing every candidate structure. The thematic nomination that came out of the work tabulated 182 spans and stated the pattern plainly: the oldest surveyed bridge dated to 1895, and before the 1890s few metal truss bridges were built anywhere in Mississippi outside a handful of major river crossings such as Aberdeen and Columbus on the Tombigbee. Smaller streams like the Chunky, Elliott wrote, had until then "largely been forded or spanned by wooden bridges". Stuckey's Bridge belongs squarely to the wave of mass-produced, catalogue-ordered steel trusses that travelling company representatives sold to county governments after 1890. Its protection came in stages. In November 1982, before any survey existed, the Permit Committee of the MDAH Board of Trustees declared every bridge on the Highway Department list a "State Archaeological Landmark" under the state Antiquities Act of 1970 — a holding action to stop counties demolishing bridges before anyone knew which ones mattered. Stuckey's Bridge was designated a Mississippi Landmark on 4 August 1984 under the number 075-MER-5804-NR-ML, entered in the county deed books on 29 October 1987, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 16 November 1988 as reference 88002415, within the "Historic Bridges of Mississippi" thematic nomination. It was listed under Criterion C, for engineering and transportation. Nothing in that file mentions a hanging, an outlaw, an inn or a ghost. Even the engineering description has been revised since. Elliott wrote "Stearns (?) through truss", question mark included, added that the bridge "fits no known type", pointed to the influence of Fink and Stearns designs, and called it the only example of its kind in the state. In August 2011 the bridge historian Nathan Holth, working from a high-resolution photograph, argued that it was an ordinary Pratt truss with extra verticals and floorbeams added later, welded rather than pinned; a site visit by James Baughn in February 2015 confirmed it. The structure's identity has been corrected twice by people who went and looked. The legend attached to it has never been corrected at all. That legend is best known through Alan Brown, a folklorist at the University of West Alabama who has published collections of Southern ghost lore with the University Press of Mississippi. His essay "Hanging at Stuckey's Bridge", printed in the 2010 anthology Weird Encounters, opens by calling it the oldest iron bridge in Lauderdale County and then lays out the story: an outlaw named Stuckey, "a member of the Dalton Gang", who ran an inn on the river's edge; eighteen people hanged from the bridge during the 1800s; Stuckey himself apprehended, tried and hanged there in the early 1850s. Brown reports the sightings as reports — the ghost of "Old Man Stuckey" walking the bank on moonlit nights, a lantern along the water, a heavy splash. And, to his credit, he records the difficulty in the same passage: other sources, he notes, maintain that Stuckey's Bridge was built in 1901 to replace an older wooden one.

Stuckey's Bridge is closed. It was barricaded on 24 August 2011 and has stayed that way. Do not plan on crossing it: the last inspection figures on record, from September 2017, rate the structure overall as Poor, the deck as Poor (4 out of 9) and the substructure as Serious (3 out of 9), with a sufficiency rating of 11.7 out of 100. Elliott had already recorded its condition as no better than "fair" in the 1980s. Footage exists of a pickup being driven across in February 2010, eighteen months before the barriers went up; that is not a precedent, it is the reason for the barriers. The bridge stands where Stuckey Bridge Road meets the Chunky River, roughly six miles south of Meehan in Lauderdale County and around twenty kilometres south-west of Meridian, at approximately 32.2558° N, 88.8552° W. The approach is unpaved county road through pine woods: unlit, narrow, with nowhere obvious to turn a car around. There is no car park, no interpretation panel, no toilet, no lighting and no staff. The structure is owned by Lauderdale County and it is a Mississippi Landmark, which means that under state law the Department of Archives and History must approve any alteration or removal. Graffiti, prised-up deck boards and metal cut away for souvenirs are not pranks here; they are damage to a legally protected structure, and the timber rails in most photographs already carry the marks. Enigma Atlas is not going to tell you to come after dark. The honest advice is the opposite: see it in daylight, from the roadway, from outside the barrier, and stay off the deck. Land on either side of the river is not uniformly public, so stay on the road — the folklore anthology that carries the legend prints its own warning that not every site in it can be visited and that visitors risk prosecution for trespassing. The Chunky is a small, gravel-bedded stream whose vascular flora was catalogued in 2007 by the botanist Lucas C. Majure, who treats the bridge as one of the landmarks of the river corridor. In the middle of the day it is a genuinely handsome place, which is rather more than the legend deserves.