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The King’s Highway
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Business New Haven
5/1/2000
By:
Priscilla Searles
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On January 22, 1673 a rider left New York on horseback carrying mail and traveling through New Haven, Hartford, Springfield en route to Boston. The trip took approximately 14 days. The route to Boston, then a city only 40 years old, was still untamed wilderness and made even more difficult by the native Pequots, who took a dim view of strange white men traveling through their territory. The route traveled was known as the King's Highway or the Great Road - the first post road on the American continent.
Despite popular belief, U.S. Route 1 and the Boston Post Road are not the same. There were three Boston Post Roads leading from Boston to New Haven, merging in the Elm City to become one route to New York City. The "road" to Boston was created so English governors could communicate with one another, not for the benefit of casual travelers. When the Dutch took back New York (or New Amsterdam) for a brief time, mail runs to Boston stopped until the English reclaimed the city.
Residents of Connecticut and Massachusetts took little notice of the Boston-to-New York route; they had other things on their mind. Indian raids, the burning of Deerfield, and a massacre in Lancaster, Mass. kept most people preoccupied for four years with no time to consider road improvements. Fearless riders would continue to deliver mail on horseback for more than a century. It would be 1785 before the first government mail contract was awarded to a stage line.
Stages were probably the driving force behind much of the development of the Post Road. Taverns began to pop up along the route and business began to thrive. By 1830 more than 2,000 mail and passenger coaches were arriving in or departing Boston every week. As to taverns, the sleeping quarters in many were designed like bad dormitories - no windows, often no fireplace and multiple beds in one small room where you probably had to share not just your room but even your bed with strangers. And women often found themselves sharing a room with a man they never laid eyes on before.
There were, of course, other challenges. We take bridges for granted, but for many years the only way over the Housatonic River in Stratford was by ferry. Indeed one was already in place when that first rider left New York for Boston.
And then there were rocks, boulders, streams and other hazards to overcome and a certain lack of interest in road improvements in many of the towns on the route. But the stage lines and taverns that for a brief time thrived began to disappear when the railroad appeared on the scene.
The early coaches were anything but luxurious. Crude as best, the early ones offered pretty rough riding, often equipped with rope harnesses and reckless drivers that had a few drinks under their belt before undertaking the trip from Boston to New York. By the time the Concord coach arrived on the scene, it was looked upon as a major advance in transportation. And when the Boston-to-New York run was first completed in 24 hours, people along the entire route celebrated by ringing bells and setting bonfires. The better drivers did very well financially, making up to $28 a month plus room and board on the route. Side businesses, such as doing errands, supplemented their income.
Robberies were not something drivers had to deal with. Highwaymen along the Boston Post Road were unknown. Historian Alice Morse Earle attempted to find evidence of robberies and was able to come up with only two - both inside jobs. In one case the wife of the driver stole money from the coach and the theft of a bonnet was recorded.
In the 1940s, before construction of the Connecticut Turnpike, the Post Road became the truck route north and the scene of numerous serious, and often fatal, accidents. The town of Orange became known as "Trucker Hell" thanks to Earl Petersen, the local chief of police. Petersen relished in giving out speeding tickets to truckers and it didn't take long for the word to spread to go slow through the little town on the Post Road that every trucker had to take when driving from New York to Boston.
Today the Post Road still rolls through Connecticut and Massachusetts towns, dotted with fast-food chains and retail establishments of every stripe. The hazards of Indian attacks and boulders have been replaced with just trying to get to your destination in what is often bumper-to-bumper traffic. You have to wonder what that first rider who delivered the mail on horseback would think of the 20th century Boston Post Road?
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