Historic Places: Mrs. G.C. Taylor, Lady at the Bridge, Winn Parish, LA Submitted by Peggy Chandler Beaubouef, 2656 Hwy 1232, Winnfield, LA 71483 ********************************************** Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ********************************************** SOURCE: June 9, 1976 Winn Parish Enterprise [PHOTO] Caption: Mrs. Mattie Taylor grew up near this abondoned iron bridge over Dugdemona in northern Winn Parish. Travelers often stopped at her parents' house west of the bridge for meals and lodging. Mrs. Taylor said she had seen tubs full of catfish taken out of Dugdemona at the iron bridge at the Walker Crossing. THE LADY AT THE BRIDGE by Tony Shelton "It's not near so big as I thought it was when I was a child," Mrs. G.C. Taylor said when she had walked almost a mile down a boggy log road to get to the abandoned iron bridge over Dugdemona. The bridge is at Walker Crossing in north Winn Parish. The floor of the bridge, abandoned 52 years ago, was gone, but Mrs. Taylor jumped up on the railroad tie walkway running along one side of the structure. "I'm not going to tell people I came all the way out here and then didn't even walk across it." Mrs. Taylor's mother and father, Mr. and Mrs Bill Burnum, lived on the east side of Dugdemona, her uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. George Burnum, on the west side. "Uncle George lived almost right on the bank. We had a phone line through here even then and one of my first memories is of people calling to see how deep the water was." "Uncle George's wife would always say, 'Belly deep.' The family was kind of embarrassed about her saying it that way." But then the iron bridge was built about 1910. "There were a lot of people coming through. My dad said that road the Monroe-Natchitoches highway was the oldest road in the state. Some of the people were going through in wagons to Campti or Natchitoches. They might be traveling with cattle." With no hotels around, many of the travelers stayed with the Burnum family. "I guess our house looked big and inviting. Anyway, we'd always find room for them. They'd spend the night and be just as welcome as if we'd always known them." Jobs were scare in the early part of this century, Mrs. Taylor said, and many of the travelers were looking for work. "Maybe they'd catch a freight train from the North on Rock Island, get off at Dodson or Wyatt and head over to catch the L & A at Goldonna. "They'd stop on the way, asking for a meal. Dad and Mother never turned anybody down. We didn't give them a handout. They came in to the table and ate." Most of what the travelers and the family ate was raised on the place or taken from the river, Mrs. Taylor said. "We didn't buy a lot of things just four, coffee, sugar. We killed our meats and raised the vegetables." The children, seven girls and one boy, raised cotton as well as vegetables. "We girls worked in the field just like we was boys. We'd chop cotton till it got so hot about 10 or 11. Then we'd ride the horses to the creek. Daddy didn't just take us for the sport. He took us to catch fish to eat. And believe me we caught them, too." "Then in the fall when we got our crop in, we'd hire out to bring in other people's crops. I picked cotton to buy my wedding dress." Mattie Burnum married G.C. Taylor just before her sixteenth birthday and moved a mile and half closer to the river. Her parents' place was three miles from Dugdemona. Now Mrs. Taylor's son Willard lives on his parents' farm and his son Ronnie lives further west toward Dugdemona. "Seems like we all kept going toward the creek." But Ronnie Taylor cannot drive directly to his great-uncle George's place on the west bank of Dugdemona. The iron bridge was closed in 1924. Some say it was politics. There might have been a more practical reason. "I think it had to do with the cost of keeping it up, especially with the sloughs there," Mrs. Taylor said. She said there were three sloughs on the east side of Dugdemona before the road reached the iron bridge First Slough with no bridge, and Ernest and Morris sloughs with wooden bridges. Whatever the reason, the police jury closed the bridge in 1924. "The last time we all came out here to fish was during World War II," Mrs. Taylor said. This time she didn't fish. Mrs. Taylor is 82. "But I'm not that old today," she said after the trip to the bridge.