The Bridges of Guffey

Some fishers know the ghost town of Guffey (McKean County) as a pleasant crossroads in the forest where there stands not a "village," but a well-maintained monument to the village's war dead. There's a nice campsite on a piney hill just above the monument: a fire ring on a broad grassy lawn, surrounded by enormous evergreens, all in rows. It's a beautiful spot above the Kinzua Creek, which surely once belonged to the town's one and only mansion, or maybe the village church. If you poke around, you'll find an old driveway with a concrete bridge leading up to the secluded site.

Well, that's Guffey's swank neighborhood. To see the grittier parts of town, approach it from the neighboring ghost town of Tallyho---which, unlike Guffey, has left not a trace to posterity. That's to say, go to the valley where you would turn off to go to Westline (Rivendell of the Allegheny!) but instead of following the Kinzua Creek downstream toward Westline, follow it upstream and eastward, toward Guffey. You'll see old fashioned electric lines running alongside the creek. These lead over very wet tracks to a huge old industrial site. There are some nice overlooks, with rusting guardrails, where the main street ran along a cliff above the creek. And there's a long-overgrown side street where company row houses probably stood. The woodland that has overtaken the actual townsite is only about 30 years old, so it's a scrubby place that hides hundreds of industrial artifacts. If you google it or look it up on the ANF map, Guffey still appears as "a populated place" with permanent structures. Good luck finding them.

The back road to Guffy is pictured here; unless you want to ford Pine Run on foot, you have to cross this bridge. It's not for the faint of heart. There's also a strange metal bridge that traverses the Kinzua. The nearby hills, which are known around here as "Tallyho Mountain" and "Music Mountain," hide more antique oil works than any other part of the forest that I know. They look lovely and wild from Highway 219, but under the trees, it's all rusted pipelines, rotting wooden half-barrels, and the scarification of greed. What happened in this place? Does anyone recall?