San Saba – Located on the banks of the San Saba River, this part of the Lone Star State has been the perfect place to find pecans since well before Texas was Texas. A good place to get a crack at some of these tasty tree nuts is Alamo Coffee and Pecan. Bob Whitten owns this small store that blind squirrels go, well, nuts for. But these baskets filled with all sorts of flavored pecans aren’t the only draw to San Saba. “People that come in our store here, a very large percentage of them are looking for the Regency Bridge, and they want to go see the Regency Bridge because of a certain other guy, a TV guy that drives across it all the time,” said Whitten.
Towering over the popular pecan trees on the north side of San Saba County, you’ll come across this massive suspension bridge that been providing a safe passage over the Colorado since 1939. “You get to see the river, you get to see beautiful country, you get to see wildlife, deer, and it’s just a beautiful drive out there,” said Whitten.
As magnificent and majestic as this modern marvel of 1939 is today, it wasn’t the first bridge to span this spot. “The people that lived out there, the ranchers and the farmers, had to have a way to go back and forth to move their crops around, and so on and so forth,” said Whitten. “So they built that bridge in 1903.”
The original bridge only stood for 23 years. “It did fall once, and in fact, the day that it fell was May the 9th, 1924, and that’s exactly 100 years ago, today,” said Whitten.
Our serendipitous shoot on that day was the anniversary of the tragedy that killed 9-year-old Raymond Burns Jernigan. “The cattle that were on the bridge, they stampeded and turned around and were going back to San Saba County, and the little boy was trapped in there on his horse, and the weight of all of those cattle piled up on the bridge,” said Whitten. “It collapsed, and the little boy died. And it’s a sad story, but it’s part of the history of the bridge.”
The rebuilt bridge was swept away by flood waters in 1936 but in 1939, the bridge you see today was built. “In 1939, it cost $30,000 to rebuild the bridge,” explained Whitten. “And in 1999, it cost between $1 million and $1.1 million to refurbish it. It hadn’t even fallen. And it’s crazy. There are 475 strands of number nine wire in one of the cables. And it’s just number nine wire, and it’s kind of twisted in there in a big cable. And it’s 3 1/4 to 3 1/2 inches in diameter. And that’s what they hung it on.”
For 85 years, the bridge has been connecting the two counties in more ways than one. “Back in the old days, the kids would meet out there, and they’d have a little dance and a get together, probably the high school kids,” said Whitten. “And I think that’s probably how the genealogy of Mills County and San Saba County got mixed up somehow, like that.”
Before traversing across this Texas bridge, I had to get Bob’s take on driving across it. “It’s the only suspension bridge in Texas you can drive across,” said Whitten. “I wasn’t real comfortable driving over it, but it kind of shakes a little bit when you go across. But there’ve been a lot of people go over back and forth over there since then. It hadn’t fallen out yet, not since they’ve done any work to it. Yeah, knock on a pecan.”
We’re good on the heights, but what about weight? “Yeah, there’s a weight limit,” said Whitten. “I don’t know what it is, but you don’t want to take a rock truck across there or something like that. But in fact, I don’t think I would take a load of cattle across there on a trailer. I don’t think I would. I’d rather go around.”
After double checking the Sequioa on a scale, we were ready to finally check this bridge off the list. You end up much higher up than you might think, but the view of the Colorado River from up there is absolutely beautiful. Despite its age, the bridge brings joy to folks of all ages and there’s a sense in these parts that keeping the bridge around for the next generation of farmers, travelers, and story tellers is what matters most to folks like Bob. “It’s important for us to have it, and we want to keep it,” said Whitten.