In 1932, an old man named B.H. Vaughn wrote a letter to the Southern Democrat remembering the hard years after the Civil War. He was seventeen in 1865. By 1869 he was appointed one of a five-man jury of review - alongside Uncle Jon Hays, Uncle Nathan Armstrong, Jimmie Armstrong, and C.W. Holt - to lay out the first public road across the mountain, from Smith Ford to Blount Springs. It was, by his account, the first public road ever built across that ground.
Judge Moore of Blountsville - the same judge who, nine years later, took W.C. Reid’s affidavit in the 1878 train-robbery conspiracy (see The Conspiracy to Rob the Train) - told young Vaughn that if he kept the confidence of the county’s good men, he might do something more worthwhile someday, and predicted a bridge would eventually be built at Smith Ford. Vaughn says he didn’t forget it.
In 1895, in the middle of another hard depression - cotton at $4.25 per hundred pounds, the going wage 50 cents a day - Vaughn built that bridge himself. He names the men who worked it with him: Jim Reid, Jim Culwell, Luke Holt, Jim Lanningham, Tom and Jakin Gilliam, and George Green. One of them, Jim Reid, may well be James Harris “Jim” Reid (1872-1919), son of George W. Reid of the nearby Reid’s Gap Cemetery - he’d have been about 23 in 1895, the right age - though “Jim Reid” isn’t a rare enough name to call that settled.
Both Smith Ford and Vaughns Bridge are real, independently documented places - a University of Alabama historic-places survey lists Smith Ford on maps from 1892 and 1907, and Vaughns Bridge on a map from 1961, confirming the crossing outlived Vaughn himself by decades.
Vaughn’s own hand-built bridge didn’t last forever, but the crossing did. Zelma Clyde Tidwell - the same builder behind the Swann and Nectar covered bridges - is credited with a “Vaughn Bridge” among the roughly dozen Town Lattice covered bridges his crew raised across Blount County between 1927 and 1936. No exact build date survives for it, and it isn’t among the handful of covered bridges still standing in the county today, but it’s a real, plausible second chapter to this story: a proper covered bridge, built by the county’s own bridge crew, that replaced or formalized Vaughn’s original 1895 crossing - decades before “Vaughns Bridge” turns up by name on that 1961 map.
Burrell Hartwell Vaughn was born May 3, 1852, and died May 30, 1934, not quite two years after his letter ran. He’s buried at Union Grove Cemetery in Hayden. His obituary in the Southern Democrat calls him “one of the oldest citizens of this county,” a member of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church active in the area’s early religious life, survived by his widow Nancy, a son, five daughters, a brother, and a sister. The Hays, Armstrong, and Holt names on his 1869 road jury match families independently identified elsewhere as among the earliest settlers of the Reid’s Gap/Hayden district - real corroboration of who was actually out here in the decades before the railroad and the resort era took hold.
Related: Reid’s Gap, The Conspiracy to Rob the Train, and Zelma Clyde Tidwell, Blount County’s Bridge Builder.
Sources: B.H. Vaughn, “History of Hayden,” letter to the Southern Democrat, November 17, 1932; Vaughn obituary, the Southern Democrat, June 7, 1934; and the University of Alabama Historical Places survey of Blount County, confirming Smith Ford and Vaughns Bridge independently.
