Take a look at the map of today’s walk, which takes me from Old Saybrook, Connecticut to Clinton. To me it resembles a river meandering along, as Thoreau says, “sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.”  In my case I am following the oldest roads, which also followed the shortest way to a destination, but avoided any difficult obstacles such as wide rivers or large hills if possible.  As time passed bridges were built and roads were straightened, sometimes by removing obstacles in the way such as hills, with the brute force that was more readily available after the Industrial Revolution.  Thoreau would not have approved of the development of the Interstate: he was offended by the train to Concord and Fitchburg from Boston which still passes the shore of his beloved Walden Pond.  Today trains seem old-fashioned and have a romantic aura about them, but to Thoreau they were part of the problem-- they allowed people to do things “faster” which caused them to miss the small details which to Thoreau were what made life worth living: “I have learned that the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.” (1)

        Most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers were probably unswayed by Thoreau’s glorification of the journey itself, as travel was a dirty, slow, and sometimes dangerous business best done with as quickly as possible. Sarah Knight certainly was in a hurry to get to her destination, do her business, and get home. Alexander Hamilton and James Birket, on the other hand, were traveling in the modern sense, for the sake of traveling.  For Hamilton, his journey from Maryland to Maine was done for health reasons, to avoid the “stagnant air” of Chesapeake Bay in summer, while Birket was traveling from the Caribbean for much the same reason.  They recorded their journeys in a somewhat more positive light than Knight, although Hamilton was not a big fan of Connecticut and its high moral tone.  Hence their journals are of great interest to me as they are filled with observations about the landscape, the customs of the country, and the roads, towns, and taverns they visited. Knight’s diary provides less detail, but it is often inadvertently quite humorous because she seems to hate most everybody and everything she saw on her travels, especially the food, and it reads like a travel narrative by Paul Theroux at times.

        Most travelers, like Knight, would have preferred a shorter journey and over time the Boston Post Road was shortened-- a bend was straightened, a bridge was built across a river, and a circuitous but relatively level and dry path created by the footfall of thousands of feet was made straighter. If I do a Google Maps search for directions from the Old State House in Boston to Bowling Green in Manhattan, the result is a 230 mile journey on Interstate 95, which roughly follows the route of the lower Post Road (or a 217 mile journey on the Mass Pike and I-84 to New Haven, then continuing on I-95 into New York, the route of the Upper Post Road).  The almanac of 1698 published by Tulley lists the lower Post Road route, as a journey of 278 miles. By 1732 Prince’s Almanac records the trip as 271 miles, seven miles shorter.  Traveling the same route via US-1, a product of the 1920s, as closely as possible produces a trip of about 239 miles. Thus from Tulley to I-95 the distance from Boston to New York on the coastal route has been shortened by 48 miles in three hundred years, about a mile every six years. (see note 2)

        Interestingly, Prince lists taverns from Boston to New London by specific name, the town in which the tavern is located, and the distances between taverns. After New London he lists only the names of towns as Tulley did; in fact the list of towns and distances from New London to New York are identical, with one or two discrepancies that are clearly mistakes in transcription (or copying, plagiarizing, stealing, call it what you will), from Tulley’s almanac. Research in the eighteenth century was not often original;  information from one source frequently was lifted directly and published by another author without credit. Prince confesses as much indirectly when he states on the second page of his almanac “in the names of the counties and courts we have gone as far as Virginia and, should with pleasure have proceeded to South Carolina if we could have gotten due intelligence.” Some pages later there is an advertisement in the Prince Almanac which requests “If any Gentleman in the Southern Provinces will please to send the publishers of this vade mecum, an exact account of the several counties, towns, courts, fairs, roads, &c. in their several governments; they shall be very gratefully received and added to this composure to render it more universally acceptable and useful to the American plantations.”  Not exactly a scientific process, but some information was better than none.

*****

        But I digress-- or should I say, I am sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. I mainly wish to say that a glance at the map above shows a blue line that indicates the route I describe below.  A perspicacious reader will observe that there is a yellow road marked Boston Post Road (or US-1) that follows a somewhat more direct road from Westbrook to Clinton and wonder why a blog that is about the Boston Post Road does not follow the Boston Post Road. The short answer is, that road did not exist at the time of Knight or Hamilton but was built much later.  This particular stretch of road is shown on a map of Westbrook from the 1850s as the “proposed road” and is drawn with hash marks to show that it has not yet been built. A journey along Boston Post Road reveals why this road was so long in development--it crosses at least three bodies of water and even today traverses a substantial amount of tidal salt marsh-- and thus required the tools of the Industrial Revolution to enable its construction. In colonial America, individual towns were responsible for the upkeep of roads within their bounds; hence a large road project was unlikely to be undertaken and the old Indian trails would have to suffice.  Subsequently the rise of railroads and canals delayed the development of a true highway system in America. Not until the rise of the automobile culture in the early twentieth century did anything like the modern road system start to be developed.

        Although Boston Post Road (US-1) is interesting and I often travel along it when the old road and the newer road converge, which happens frequently, I am interested in the deeper history of the oldest road, and it is this road which I am following as closely as possible. There is a density of historical, natural, and cultural detail along this road that is often lacking on the parts that overlap with US-1. It takes longer, but that is what makes it worth the trip. Driving along US-1 or I-95 is like channel-surfing: you spend a lot of time moving rapidly along through the landscape (or the channels), but in the end you see nothing. So I will walk the extra distance today (in this case 9 miles instead of 8.4 miles along the more direct route) as I do in every entry, even if it takes longer to get to my destination because I enjoy the journey.

*****

       

            I head down Old Boston Post Road in Old Saybrook past the Acton Public Library and through a fine residential neighborhood. After almost a mile this road rejoins Boston Post Road (US-1) for 200 yards and crosses the Oyster River. Then Old Boston Post Road veers sharply left away from Boston Post Road and follows the west bank of the river, eventually curving westward away from it and slowly curving back up to meet Boston Post Road again. The journey west from Saybrook was obviously “improved” by the creation of the straighter Boston Post Road (sometime around 1800 according to an old map of Saybrook I find in the Acton Public Library), but I decided to follow Old Boston Post Road rather than the newer road, and so I missed seeing the McDonald’s and various chains and was forced to look out over salt marsh and pass a number of eighteenth-century houses with little or no traffic to accompany me on my detour. Quel dommage.

       Incidentally, passing the Oyster River reminds me that one meal that was frequently served to our eighteenth-century travelers was “Roast Oisters.”  Knight comments that “There are plenty of Oysters all along by the seaside, as far as I Rode in the Collony, and these were very good.” (Knight p.64)  I rejoin Boston Post Road after three quarters of a mile, and the two roads become one for the next two and a half miles until I reach the center of Westbrook, CT.  Here I pass a Dairy Queen, a Days Inn, Thrifty Rental Car, and other modern commercial establishments. I also pass the beautiful Bushnell Farm from 1678, and a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses. So, as usual, a mixed bag on US-1. As I cross into the town of Westbrook I spot a turkey vulture on the side of the road who also spots me and heads into the air.  He hovers nearby so I know something gory awaits ahead, and sure enough I find a dead raccoon by the side of the road.  As I leave the scene the vulture swoops back in for lunch.  The vulture is probably one of the few animals to benefit from the development of the automobile.

        I stop in the center of Westbrook for a bite to eat at a deli near the town green. The town center displays the split personality that is typical of US-1-- A giant Walgreens anchors one corner of the triangular green while elegant nineteenth-century commercial buildings make up the rest. Thus, if I keep my back to the Walgreens I see a lovely New England town, but if I face the Walgreens I see ugly, faceless, soulless, modern US-1.  Does a pharmacy really have to be that big?

        After a delicious roast beef au jus sandwich at the Westbrook Deli, where I surveyed the clientele and the friendly employees and was told we were still in Red Sox territory but that there were plenty of Yankee fans (and a couple of Mets fans even!)  I head back out with a freshly-baked brownie in hand to make my way to Clinton.  Passing the majestic Congregational Church on a high point on the far side of the town center, I reach a junction where Boston Post Road diverges to the southwest and Old Clinton Road heads northwest. I would typically choose to follow Old Clinton Road based merely on the obvious name, but I am aided in making my choice by a nineteenth-century map of Westbrook I found in the library which shows what is today Boston Post Road as an unbuilt “proposed road,” the one I mentioned above.  The Old Clinton Road appears to be more circuitous on the map, but a look at the topography and a knowledge of the local history reveals why.  Westbrook was originally called “Pochaug” by the Indians who resided here, a word meaning “place where the river divides,” and indeed two rivers do form the estuary which is just southwest of here, the Patchogue and the Menunketesuck rivers (3). The whole area south and west of Westbrook center is essentially a tidal estuary, through which Boston Post Road was built in the latter half of the nineteenth century.  The traveler of old would have been obliged to head up and around the widest parts of these rivers, crossing at narrower sections of the rivers.  So onto Old Clinton Road I go.

        Almost immediately on Old Clinton Road I pass the old town cemetery. Then I head downhill, and I cross a bridge over the surprisingly wide and swift-running Patchogue River. I then head back uphill and enter a neighborhood of old houses.  One house immediately attracts my attention-- a house with a sign that reads “Jeremiah Lee House, 1740-1750.”  Westbrook was part of Saybrook until 1840. Both Hamilton and Birket bypassed the center of Saybrook and stopped at a place run by a widow named Lay, which was seven miles from Saybrook Ferry according to Birkett and “six miles from Seabrook” according to Hamilton.  A tavern run by a Leigh is listed as five miles from Saybrook Center and seven miles from Saybrook Ferry in Low’s 1775 Almanac.  As this house is in what was once part of Saybrook, is five miles from Old Saybrook, and dates to the 1740s, lacking any further evidence to the contrary, I suggest that this may be the place mentioned as Leigh’s (or Lay’s).

        Hamilton here pokes fun at Connecticut again and specifically at Madam Lay.  He says of her title “I find they are not quite so scrupulous about bestowing titles here as in Maryland. My landlady goes by the name of Madam Lay. I cannot tell for what, for she is the homeliest piece both as to mein, make, and dress that ever I saw...but it is needless to dispute her right to the title since we know many upon whom it is bestowed who have as little right as she.” (Hamilton August 27, 1744. p164)

        I continue on Old Clinton Road, a relatively quiet road through neighborhoods of newer and older houses located in the woods. After another mile I pass the entrance to the Salt Meadow Division of the Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge, which protects a vital bird flyway along the shore of Long Island Sound.  On cue, a pair of White-breasted Nuthatches chase each other through the trees. After another mile I come very close to Interstate 95, where all the traffic I have encountered has been either heading to as this is the location of exit 64.  All the traffic to and from the the town of Clinton seems to be passing me now as it is rush hour. Standing at this busy juncture I face away from the highway and am  pleasantly surprised to see a beautiful red barn sitting placidly in a field only a couple of hundred yards from Interstate 95.  The scenery on the road here is actually quite pretty, and the walk is enjoyable despite the heavy traffic rushing past. After another half a mile I reach the second of the two rivers I mentioned earlier, the Menunketesuck River. This river marks the boundary between Westbrook and Clinton.  Old Clinton Road changes to Old Post Road after I cross the river. I rejoin Boston Post Road again after another mile for the final time today. The road changes name again to East Main Street and soon I reach the town of Clinton. The sun is setting now and I need a place to stay. Hamilton only mentions passing through what was then known as Killingsworth, Knight stopped here but did not give a detailed description, but Birket “Lodged at one Merrils a very poor Indifferent House & had lodgings [sic] had roasted Oisters for Supper.” (Birket p. 35 October 8, 1750) As I walk along pretty Main Street, passing house after house from the eighteenth century, I see a house that belonged to Eben Merrill which was built in 1735. The 1775 Almanac lists a Merrill’s Tavern five miles from Leigh’s, which is about the distance here from the house I propose as Leigh’s Tavern in Saybrook, give or take a mile. I am tempted to knock on the door and ask for lodging but instead stay in a cabin at the nearby Village Motel. The friendly woman who runs the place tells me that the library has been moved up near the Interstate, about a mile away from the town center where it used to be, and she wonders “How are the older people going to get there; they used to walk when it was in town. My daughter has to be driven there now. I wish it was in the center.”

        I head out to make the long trek up to the library, passing through the lovely town center of Clinton and  crossing the absolutely beautiful Indian River, where I meet a couple who catch a Striped Bass just as I pass. Apparently they have more luck here than on the shore of Long Island Sound. Fortunately for this foot-long fish, he is under the 28 inch minimum required to take a Striper, so back he goes and can happily continue heading up and down the sedulously flowing Indian River as it makes its determined saunter to the sea.  I too saunter to the library under a crystal clear sky. While I gaze at the stars I smell the bracing aroma of low tide from the salt marsh on my right. A bat flies by and a lone heron saunters (if I can use the word to describe the pace of a flying bird) across the sky to its rookery. This slow walking stuff is not too bad.  I highly recommend it.