Colorado Melons

I went out for a quick cruise in the ‘66 this morning and as I was heading south on Rt 24 towards the old Peyton bridge, I remembered a buddy sharing some folklore with me recently about the old Peyton Jail so I thought I’d take a couple of minutes to go exploring.

As the story goes, the bridge abutments were hollow with barred windows so that prisoners who were working on the road crews could be put in the hole at night, a piece of plate steel being slid over and a dump truck parked on top to prevent their escape.

The highway being all but desolate early on this cool holiday morning, I parked alongside the road and headed down the embankment to take a look for myself.

Sure enough, window openings built into the embankment and some still had the barred gratings on them, just like he said.

Closer inspection revealed that over time these openings seem to have become more of a party spot for local adolescents, as you might imagine. I’ll spare you the interior graffiti.

As I checked things out, one of the first things that came into view was the continuously poured ceiling on top of the deck trusses. I could find no evidence of where an earlier top opening would have later been closed or poured-over.

The second thing that came to mind was that these openings were actually made large enough to climb through; intended more of as a man-way, for the bridge base to ventilate & “breath”, and for future inspections and maintenance access, guarded by bars in a failed attempt to keep the would be explorers out.  If we were going to keep people in here, we probably would’ve left them a much smaller, impassible hole.

To keep things in their proper perspective, when we were talking about this story, something to the effect of “you know how those stories go” was also mentioned, so I didn’t do this to prove or disprove anything. But it did give me good reason to stop the ride, get out of the truck for a few minutes and take a walk down by a little, half-frozen stream that evidently gets crossed from time to time by some four-wheelers & ATV’s.

I wonder if there’s any cool, old stories about the adjacent, defunct train tressel. No matter. I’ll just bring the boys. They’ll give me enough reason to go climb around it. 

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