Stage-coach and Tavern Days

by Alice Morse Earle

FROM PATH TO TURNPIKE

The first roads in New England are called in the early court-records “trodden paths.” They were narrow worn lines, scarce two feet wide, lightly trodden over pine needles and fallen leaves among the tree trunks by the soft moccasined foot of the tawny savages as they walked silently in Indian file through the forests. These paths were soon deepened and worn bare by the heavy hobnailed shoes of the white settlers, others were formed by the slow tread of domestic cattle, the best of all path makers, as they wound around the hillsides to pasture or drinking place. Then a scarcely broader bridle-path for horses, perhaps with blazed trees as guide-posts, widened slowly to travelled roads and uneven cart-ways. These roads followed and still wind to-day in the very lines of the foot-path and the cattle-track.

The early colonists walked as did their predecessors, the Indians, on their own stout legs, when they travelled by land. We find even the governors of the colonies walking off sturdily into the forests; crossing the rivers and brooks on fallen trees; and sometimes being carried across “pick-a-back” by vigorous Indian guides. We have one record of Governor Winthrop in that dependent and rather un-governor-like attitude, and it is well to think of this picture of him as affording a glimpse of one of the human sides of his life, to balance the prevailing Chinese worship and idealization of him and our other ancestors.

The earliest trail or path was the old Plymouth or Coast Path, which connected the capitols of two colonies, Boston and Plymouth. It ran through old Braintree, and its permanence was established by an action of the General Court in 1639. The Old Connecticut Path started from Cambridge, ran through Marlborough, Grafton, Oxford, and on to Springfield and Albany. The New Connecticut Path or Road started also from Cambridge, thence to Grafton, then to Worcester, Brookfield, and on to Albany. The Providence Path ran through Narragansett and Providence Plantations. The Nipmuck Trail was made from Norwich. The “Kennebunk Road by the Sea” was ordered by the Massachusetts Commissioners in 1653, sufficient highway “between towns and towns for horse and foot.” Kittery and York were enjoined to “make straight and convenient way along East for Man and Horse.”

The most famous of all these paths was the one known as the Bay Path. It was in existence in 1673, and doubtless before. It left the Old Connecticut Path at Wayland, Massachusetts, and ran through Marlborough to Worcester, then to Oxford, Charlton, and Brookfield, where jutted off the Hadley Path, to Ware, Belchertown, and Hadley, while the Bay Path rejoined the Old Connecticut Path and thus on to Springfield. Holland wrote of the Bay Path in his novel of that title:—

“It was marked by trees a portion of the distance and by slight clearings of brush and thicket for the remainder. No stream was bridged, no hill was graded, and no marsh drained. The path led through woods which bore the mark of centuries, over barren hills which had been licked by the Indian hounds of fire, and along the banks of streams that the seine had never dragged. A powerful interest was attached to the Bay Path. It was the channel through which laws were communicated, through which flowed news from distant friends, and through which came long, loving letters and messages. That rough thread of soil, chipped by the blades of a hundred streams, was a trail that radiated at each terminus into a thousand fibres of love, and interest, and hope, and memory. Every rod had been prayed over by friends on the journey and friends at home.”

Born in a home almost by the wayside of the old Bay Path, I feel deeply the inexplicable charm which attaches itself to these old paths or trails. I have ridden hundreds of miles on these various Indian paths, and I ever love to trace the roadway where it is now the broad, travelled road, and where it turns aside in an overgrown and narrow lane which is to-day almost as neglected and wild as the old path. There still seems to cling to it something of the human interest ever found in a foot-path, the intangible attraction which makes even the simplest foot-path across a pasture, or up a wooded hill, full of charm, of suggestion, of sentiment.

It is interesting to see how quickly the colonists acquired horses. Before John Winthrop died Massachusetts had a cavalry corps. Restrictive measures were enjoined by the magistrates to improve the breed and limit the number of horses. These horses were poor and scrubby and small, but before 1635 a cargo of Flemish draft horses was imported. A characteristic American breed, the Narragansett Pacers, was reared in Rhode Island. They were famous saddle-horses, giving ease of motion to the rider, being sure-footed and most tough and enduring. For a century they were raised in large numbers and sold at good prices, but became little valued after trotting-horses were bred and folk drove instead of riding horseback. I saw the last of the Narragansett Pacers. She died about twenty years ago; of an ugly sorrel color, with broad back and short legs and a curious rocking pace, she seemed almost a caricature of a horse, but was, nevertheless, a source of inordinate pride to her owner.

Women rode with as much ease and frequency as men. Young girls rode on side saddles for long journeys. Older women rode behind men on pillions, which were padded cushions which had a sort of platform stirrup. An excellent representation of a pillion is here given in Mr. Henry’s charming picture, “Waiting at the Ferry,” as well as of an old-time gig used at the end of the eighteenth and in the early part of the nineteenth century.