The Gudgeonville Bridge
N 41° 58.935 W 080° 16.012
17T E 560733 N 4648065
This bridge is one of the three remaining covered bridges left in Erie County, Pennsylvania.
Waymark Code: WMVVN
Location: Pennsylvania, United States
Date Posted: 10/20/2006
Views: 225
This description is quoted from TEAM NOVA's page of their cache nearby. (http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=2cf3653f-4c72-477a-ab6c-ac5e98800e80&log=y&decrypt=)
"One of these bridges lies south of Girard - The Gudgeonville Bridge. Gudgeonville is not a town, it never was. It is in actuality a memorial. As we drove along the winding woods cloaked Gudgeonville Road, we caught glimpses of a curving stretch of high sheer cliffs through the trees.
These high banks appeared almost unnaturally smooth, like they were made of a fine poured cement or dark ceramic of some sort. This is The Devil's Backbone, a stretch of alternating bank cliffs along Elk Creek - bare gouges where the native soft gray shale is exposed and becomes a featureless clay-like wall. Unearthly is the word… and there it sat, under the eaves of the Devil's Backbone, guarding Elk Creek like a wooden knight.
Two ghosts are said to haunt the bridge. One is that of a little girl from a nearby family, who was playing too near the shale cliffs by the bridge, and fell to her death sometime back in the 1940s or 50s. She is said to walk the bridge on moonless nights. The other ghost that has been seen on rare occasions is not human. It is instead the ghost of a mule named Gudgeon. Maybe a legend, but based enough on fact to allow the local Erie County historians to take a certain amount of pride in its uniqueness.
Sometime around 1855, a man from Kentucky by the name of Obadiah Will was delivering a mule to a fellow in Meadville, PA. As fate would have it, Will and his mule had just reached the bridge over Elk Creek at the same time as a couple of barges were coming up the Beaver and Erie canal, which ran only a short distance from the creek. On board the barges was a circus - the Girard based "Dan Rice's Circus". On one of the barges, a calliope began playing. When the squawking roaring hooting of the calliope reached the ears of Gudgeon the mule, the animal supposedly dug its hooves into the bridge, and dropped dead from fright.
A second (and less poetic) version says that the mule froze in fright, but that Mr. Will took a large stick to the beast to try to get it to move, but ended up hitting Gudgeon hard enough to kill him! In either case, the final irony of the situation was that the calliope had supposedly been playing "My Old Kentucky Home" at the time. Obadiah Will was given permission to bury Gudgeon on the west bank of the creek. To further commemorate his poor Gudgeon, Will hired a local painter to paint the words "Gudgeonville Bridge" on either end of the bridge. One source claims that Will later attempted to pursue litigation against the circus, but the result of this is unknown.
The circus owner, Dan Rice, did apparently feel bad enough about the whole matter that he wrote up the tale in a eulogy form. And indeed, for whatever the truth of the matter, Gudgeon the Mule has at least been commemorated with a bridge and a road for all time!"
Current Condition of Bridge: Gone - replaced with modern
Description of Covered Bridge:
The bridge has been an unfortunate victim of vandalism. However, it is still in good shape structually.
Year Built: 1837/01/01
Location (Road - City - State - Country): Girard Twp, Gudgeonville Road, Erie County, Pa
Web Address: Not listed
Parking (If not at the bridge):: Not listed
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