Norfolk, Massachusetts is a small New England town almost thirty miles from Boston along the Great Road to Providence that Dr. Alexander Hamilton followed to and from Boston in 1744. Norfolk has an estimated population of 11,118 (US Census 2009) contained in 15.2 square miles (731 inhabitants/square mile), making it the least densely populated town I have visited thus far. By contrast Boston has a population density greater than 12,000 inhabitants/square mile, almost twenty times more densely populated than Norfolk. This is almost as rural as it will get on this walk through Southern New England. The town center has a nice library, a new town office, a truly ugly Walgreens, a couple of small businesses near the railroad station, a pretty nineteenth-century church, some pleasant residential architecture near the center, and a lot of woods. The Post Road most likely did not pass through the center of Norfolk. A look at the map below (click on and magnify the map) shows that West Street arrives from Walpole and becomes Main Street once it enters Norfolk. Shortly afterwards, Main Street intersects with Seekonk Street, which is a big clue as to the direction of the road. Seekonk is on Narragansett Bay and the Post Road occasionally was referred to as the Bay Road or the Road to Seekonk or the Road to Bristol, just beyond Seekonk in Rhode Island. It is likely that some people might have traveled to this point from Dedham via Medfield on High Street (Route 109) then turned southward onto Seekonk Street and arrived here in what was then North Wrentham. The two roads from Dedham would have met here in the earliest days and merged into one road, which in Norfolk is called Needham Street. The reason I think this is the correct road is apparent from a glance at the map, as the road continues in a southerly direction rather than making a sharp turn and detour through Norfolk Center.

    I decided to follow Needham Street and so made my way back from Norfolk center to the junction of Main, Seekonk, and Needham Streets. I turned right onto Needham Street and followed it through a quiet, wooded, residential area. After a few minutes Needham Street intersects with North Street and becomes North Street. At this junction is the Audubon Society’s Stony Brook Wildlife Sanctuary, 240 acres of swamp, open fields, ponds, and streams. It is very beautiful. A dam built here at the Stony Brook once served to power mills, and incredibly, given the very tranquil and pastoral nature of the scenery, the area was the site of the Norfolk Woolen Company until 1932.

    Another four miles of walking through rural residential areas, not particularly densely populated, but busy enough to have to pay attention to traffic on these roads that lack sidewalks, brings me near to the center of Wrentham, Massachusetts. As I near the center I pass wide open fields which are the property of the Wrentham State School, which in the politically incorrect but well meaning early twentieth century was once known as the “school for the feeble-minded.” The red brick buildings and open setting have a distinctly late nineteenth-century institutional feel and, together with the prison I passed in Norfolk in the previous entry, add a late nineteenth-century flavor to a walk that has been grounded in the eighteenth century and strongly flavored by the twentieth century.

    Shortly before I arrive in the center of town I pass King Philip Regional High School. I went to college with a guy who went to school here, and I have always thought that this school has the coolest name for a public high school anywhere. King Philip, Sachem of the Wampanoag or Pokonoket Indians, played a significant role in the history of Wrentham. This town is located in what was the northern extent of Philip’s territory, which extended from the coast at Plymouth across Plymouth and Bristol Counties, and down the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay. North of this area was the domain of the Massachusett Indians, whose Sachem at the time of the settlement of Boston was Chicatawbut. Thus at some point in the last few miles I have left what was once Massachusett territory and entered into Wampanoag territory.

 

      As early as the 1660s, a few settlers had arrived in this area, then called Wollomonopoag, from Dedham and by 1662 had purchased land from Philip (also known as Metacom). As settlement increased and the Wampanoags were pressured to give up even more territory Philip decided that the strategy of accommodation with the English was not working. The death of a traveler on the road I am trodding in Wrentham in 1676 was one of the factors that precipitated the war which bears Philip’s name. The early settlers of Wrentham, being quite distant from large population centers, were forced to flee their settlement, and most every building was burned by Philip’s warriors. The war ended badly for the Indians (there’s a surprise), and the settlers reappeared in the early 1680s to reestablish the town of Wrentham. A tavern was established as early as 1670 in Wrentham “for their refreshment on the Sabbath Day.”(1)  Early Almanacs frequently refer to Mann’s Tavern in Wrentham, which was six miles from Walpole center. Hamilton visited Mann’s twice in 1744: on July 18 he “breakfasted at Mann’s and on August 17, he dined there (see quotation above).(2)  Mann’s Tavern was still listed in 1797 as a way station on the road from Boston to New York.(3)

*****

        I eat lunch at a small diner, the Looking Glass Cafe, on the Common in Wrentham Center. After lunch I take a walk, while eating an ice cream cone, around the pretty Common in Wrentham. One plaque indicates the site of the original church from the seventeenth century, across the street from the present one constructed in 1834. A cemetery off the Common contains the grave of Samuel Mann, the original minister of the church in Wrentham and the founder of the Mann dynasty in Wrentham, which included his son, Peletiah Mann, the tavern keeper, and Horace Mann, the educator and statesman. Another marker on the Commoninforms me that Helen Keller lived in Wrentham for twelve years.

    One plaque, actually a placard, in a window of a house I pass, is also informative. It is a sign for Scott Brown, who recently won a special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by the death of Edward Kennedy, famously costing the Democratic Party the filibuster-proof majority it had attained in the Senate and throwing a lifeline to a battered Republican Party in the northeastern United States. At present there are no Republican members of the House of Representatives from New England, and a distinctly small minority of Senators. Scott Brown dramatically increased the population of Northeast Republicans and shocked the country by winning what almost everybody assumed was a “safe seat” for the Democratic Party. Wrentham is Scott Brown’s hometown, where he served until recently as the state senator for much of the area I have walked through. One of only a handful of Republicans in the State Senate in Massachusetts, Brown achieved victory through tireless effort and by creating an image of himself as a “regular guy” who drives a Ford pickup and raises a family just like most people. I have to hand it to him--he campaigned in Jamaica Plain, my home neighborhood and an extremely liberal area, as well as in Dorchester, both places in which he was unlikely to pick up many votes (and didn’t). He also stood in the freezing cold outside Fenway Park on New Year’s Day, greeting Bruins fans going to see a rare outdoor hockey game. Here in Wrentham, Brown received 73% of the vote, his highest total. However, lest one think his vote total was all about him being the hometown boy, I should point out that only three towns in the entire area south and west of Boston voted for John McCain in the 2008 Presidential election: Walpole, Norfolk, and Wrentham, the last three towns through which I have passed on this project. We are in the area most ripe for the picking for Republicans. Many outside of Massachusetts have a confused idea that the state is overflowing with birkenstock-wearing, granola-eating, gay-marriage-loving lefties. True, we do have more than our fair share, but they are concentrated in Boston, Cambridge, the western suburbs, Provincetown, and the Pioneer Valley. The rest of the state, particularly Norfolk County, Worcester County and the area near the New Hampshire border is actually pretty conservative. The reason the Republicans tend to fail in these areas in Presidential elections is the quality of the candidates they put up, who many see as moralizing bible thumpers, which doesn’t go down well in these here parts. New England voters will vote Republican (see Reagan, Romney), but only if Republicans do not try to ram a bible down their throats. Brown knew that, took advantage of one of the worst campaigns ever run by a Massachusetts politician, worked hard, and stayed on message. As long as he does not forget Wrentham, he will probably stay in office for as long as he wants.

*****

       After a half an hour of walking through Wrentham on Route 1A, past pleasant Victorian houses, I come to a junction called Wampum Corner. One road leads right to Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The left fork in the junction is a continuation of Route 1A and leads to my final destination today, North Attleborough. In 1751, this section of the road, from North Attleborough to Wampum Corner, was constructed to reduce the distance from Boston to Providence and to draw traffic away from the older road which ran to the east through what is now Foxborough. This “shortcut” was the deciding factor in changing the course of traffic and making this road, the Great Road to Providence, one of the most traveled roads in colonial America. In 1767, the first regular stagecoach between Boston and Providence was established by Thomas Sabin along this road.(4)  Often travelers would continue to New York by boat from Providence as the road to New York was still a difficult passage even at this late date. The Great Road to Providence was eventually bypassed in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the construction of the Bristol and Norfolk Turnpike, which reduced travel time from Boston to Providence to six or seven hours.

        Today this section of the Post Road, or Great Road to Providence, or the New Road, is one of the worst sections I have traveled thus far. There are no sidewalks and narrow shoulders. The traffic is heavy and consists of many cars heading to the Wrentham Premium Outlet Village (isn’t that an oxymoron?) and a lot of trucks making their way down Route 1A to Interstate 495. Twenty minutes walk brings me to the junction with I-495, which I carefully make my way through, scrambling along the weedy edges of the road across the busy entrance and exit ramps. Immediately after the highway is the busy shopping mall mentioned above, which I am forced to pass, again with no sidewalks to make my walk easier and safer. Finally, after fifteen more minutes of scrambling through this shopping mall-highway wasteland, I reach the border with the town of Plainville, the most unfortunately named town I have thus far encountered. Originally settled as part of Wrentham, the original settler was named Benjamin Slack, and the area became known as Slackville. This name was even more unfortunate than the name chosen for the town upon its creation in 1905 from parts of Wrentham and North Attleborough, one of the last towns to be created in Massachusetts. Perhaps they ran out of names.

Joseph Mann, tavern keeper of Mann’s Tavern. portrait by John Singleton Copley, 1754.