First would come a settlement’s meetinghouse, he notes, “then a tavern, then a marketplace’’ and withal, “a sense of permanency, safety, and hope.’’
Jaffe’s paean to this roadway, which began as a series of Indian paths and over time became a pair of US highways, offers not just a history of an important Northeastern thoroughfare but represents a kind of lens through which the reader can follow the development of America over four centuries.
In the early years, it was a “post road’’ in the direct sense of a postal route. Mathias Nicolls, the country’s first regular mail carrier, left New York for Boston, via Hartford, in January 1673, with the round trip taking about a month.
“News,’’ remarks Jaffe, “gravitated’’ naturally to the post offices usually housed in a tavern along the route and by the early 1700s, “colonial postmasters considered it their right . . . to publish a newspaper.’’ By 1759, Jaffe reports, there were 10 newspapers along the route.
Then, sharing the road with the mails were the wagons of industry and commerce — hats from Stonington, “enough nails to supply the country’’ from Providence — and from Springfield down to New Haven, it was “a corridor of weaponry.’’
The original Massachusetts Turnpike was born in 1796 from the dissatisfaction of early stagecoach operators with the original route as it became rocky through Palmer and Warren. Today’s Massachusetts Turnpike runs near the old route only at Wilbraham.
And when the railroads came, they followed the original roadway, with Boston being “the first train hub in the world’’ with three rail lines spoking out in 1835. And when the automobile replaced the train, a 1914 guide enthusiastically declared that with a thousand motor cars “[dashing] under its quiet elms,’’ the old road’s “great days have returned.’’
One of the great highway-mass transit battles occurred along the old route in the 1970s when then-Governor Frank Sargent scuttled the proposed Southwest Expressway in favor of the T’s Orange Line.
