I do not tend to stay in Bed & Breakfast establishments on this trip. It is not because I dislike them (I have a friend who says he won’t stay in any place with fewer than eight rooms and/or has lots of tchotchkes), but rather that I think they (the owners that is) dislike me. Not personally you understand, but the prospect of a lone, sweaty, male on foot showing up unannounced at their door at 7 o’clock in the evening does not excite many of them, and who can blame them? Unfortunately I learned how to walk in the United Kingdom, where such practices are much more common. I don’t think most people in the U.S. have really got the B&B concept worked out. In the UK the places can often be pretty mundane, but they do what they advertise--they offer a bed and breakfast-- and most of the hosts don’t bat an eyelash when some bedraggled American bangs on the door of their cottage in the Cotswolds, or on the outskirts of Norwich, or even in the center of Edinburgh, while here the idea of a B&B often revolves around people who are house proud and want to show their property off to appreciative guests while sipping an afternoon glass of Chardonnay and discussing thread counts. Breakfast usually involves hand-picked poached peacock eggs garnished with a Kunlun dandelion chiffonade served with hand-sliced Venezuelan capybara bacon and house-blended Fair Trade Certified coffee picked by gorillas trained by Dian Fossey in the Ruwenzori Mountains. You get the idea. I once had the “pleasure” of staying in a “B&B” in Savannah, GA where we were constantly forced to respond to questions like “Isn’t Savannah just the greatest city in the whole wide world? Have you been to such and such artisanal jewelry shop yet? Did you take the fabulous ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Garden Tour, Wine-tasting, and Condominium Sales Pitch’? You haven’t? What a shame, you might as well have not come to our super great little ol’ town ( “you uncouth ingrates” clearly audible in the voice of our host). Don’t you just love our li’l ol’ mansion? Now why did you go and have to mention slavery you damn Yankees?” I don’t think we are the B&B types if that is what a B&B is supposed to be.

        In truth I would love to stay at small, locally-owned bed and breakfasts, but there is such a disconnect between what I want a B&B to be and what passes for one here, a problem compounded by the fact that  Hollywood has done such a good job of making “strangers” into psychopathic, homicidal rapist/murderers (I will save the reader the footnote that proves from a statistical point of view that this is absolute rubbish and that a woman is at least ten times more likely to be raped or killed by someone she knows), and because I have been told point blank on a couple of occasions that they won’t take me because I am an unaccompanied male, that I actually self-censor and end up planning the end of my walks around the nearest Quality Inn or Motel 6. 

        This seems so out of the spirit of this enterprise that it often gnaws away at me all day as I walk along. Occasionally a motel is the least practical option, as it was on this day as I crossed the Pawcatuck Bridge from Rhode Island into Connecticut.  I had blisters on the soles of my feet (I have had footwear problems of late), the nearest motel was three miles up a busy road near I95, and I wanted to eat dinner in the charming restaurants that abounded on both sides of the river in the linked villages of Pawcatuck and Westerly. So I summoned up the courage to call one of the B&Bs I had found on my iPhone (this thing really has been useful--GPS, geo-tagged photos, voice memos so I can walk and talk, internet access, Google maps, a compass, Elevation Pro app, a scanner app, a flashlight, Dragon Dictation software app for free! Not to mention that apparently it can be used as a phone as well!) and, surprise, surprise, the woman on the other end of the phone could not have been more pleasant and welcoming. She practically reached through the phone and pulled me into the place. So I hung up the phone and made my way up the hill from the river to the junction of Broad Street (US1) and Pequot Trail (route 234) in Pawcatuck CT, where I found the Morgan Inn, a pretty 1920s Colonial Revival house surrounded by lush vegetation practically obscuring the sign. I knocked on the door and was met by the gregarious host Linda Allen, who, I have to say, is the embodiment of what a host should be-- friendly, proud of her house but not overbearing, welcoming, attentive to detail, and a great conversationalist. Not only was the room very pleasant and comfortable, with a deck looking out over a lush backyard garden coursing with little streams and waterfalls all neatly engineered by her husband Don, but the house had the sense that real people lived there with real interests and that the place was not an artificial construct designed to impress, but rather a place the owners wanted to make as nice as possible for themselves.  And if she did think I was a crazy psychopath, she did a good job of hiding it.

        Linda confesses to being an extrovert, as she tells me some of her story over breakfast. As a teacher in Kissimmee, Florida for many years, she was heavily involved in theatre both in Florida and since her subsequent return to her home state some years back. She likes collecting “things” as is abundantly clear from the amazing amount of old sheet music, statues, paintings, etc. that fill the guest dining room (definitely NOT tchotchkes!).  An extrovert is exactly the kind of person who should run a B&B because she is not afraid to tell you the good and bad; you can ask her tricky questions that might be a little difficult in a more restrained setting, and since I am an extrovert as well as the only guest that day, you can have a rip-roaring conversation at breakfast that covers all kinds of ground. I won’t regale you with the details of our wide-ranging conversation except to say that she thought we were “kindred spirits” in our enthusiasm for “local and small” as opposed to “corporate,” and when I hit the road (an hour after I had meant to leave because I was having such a good time) I was not only very satisfied with my breakfast of blueberry pancakes and Llama sausage (just kidding about the Llama, I think!) I was resolved to try harder to find local places to stay even if it meant the occasional rejection.

*****

        One thing Linda did tell me that did not ring true to me was that Broad Street, which is what US1 is called here in the town of Stonington CT, is the Post Road. While it seems logical that US1, which is called Post or Boston Road for much of the time in Connecticut and leads through the villages of Stonington and Mystic, should be the Post Road, the preponderance of evidence suggests it is not the original road. For one thing it runs down to the coast and passes over a number of bodies of water, including the Mystic River, which has not been my experience with the road thus far, as it tends to avoid large bodies of water wherever possible. Secondly, there is a second road leading away from the Pawcatuck Bridge called Pequot Trail which heads through quieter countryside around the “Head of the Mystic” as the area where the river narrows some three miles north of the present village of Mystic was once called. Thirdly, through my research of books on the local history of the area in both the Westerly Public Library and the Stonington Public Library, I learned that the current village of Stonington (Stonington Borough) was not firmly established until the late eighteenth century, and that Old Mystic, the name of the small village at the head of the Mystic, is called Old for a reason-- it was the original settlement, along with Pawcatuck where I spent the night, in the area, before Mystic Village and Stonington were established. Katherine Crandall, for instance, states that “in 1669, a committee under the leadership of Thomas Stanton planned Stonington’s first highway, known as the Post Road. George Denison was chosen to lay out the route, four feet wide, through the valleys and over the hills from Old Mystic to the Pawcatuck wading place, a short distance south of the bridge, which connects Rhode Island and Connecticut. The highway followed very closely the same course as the old Pequot Trail.” (1) In a similar vein town records in 1669 state that a four-rod-wide road be built from the Head of the Mystic to Kitchamaug Ford at the Pawcatuck River following “so near as may be the old Pequot Trail.” (2)

        Armed with this evidence that the Pequot Trail was the original road in this area, I set out for Old Mystic, CT on a beautiful, sunny, late summer morning with my belly full and the mixed sense of anticipation and unease that always accompanies me when I am heading into an area with few services and uncertain prospects that may prove to be rewarding all the same.  I head steeply uphill away from the river, and the landscape surprisingly quickly becomes rural. Of course the sidewalk also disappears after only a few minutes but the traffic on this road is fairly light, and there is at least a curb and some grass on the side of the road on which I can walk to separate myself from the traffic. In fact the grass and the uneven surface of the ground actually makes my feet feel better than when they are pounding the pavement. I think, and this is just a hypothesis, that the uneven surface is more natural and disperses the pressure more evenly around the whole foot thus relieving the force that has been hitting the one spot on the balls of my feet.

         I reflect on the whole issue of sidewalks which has been a constant thread through all the entries in this project. I have hitherto bemoaned the lack of sidewalks, but as I walk down this country road I start to wonder whether an extra six feet of paving on this and countless thousands of other country roads across the country, amounting to many thousands of acres of additional paved surface, is really a good thing. As long as there is a curb or a grassy area that is walkable on the side of the road it is actually perfectly fine to walk along the road without fear. It is when the road is narrow and the sides of the road are banked that I have the most trouble. So I hereby renounce my previous statements lamenting the absence of sidewalks. I would modify my complaint to say that in towns and cities there should be sidewalks, but that in the country or along highways there should be space to walk but it does not have to be paved, just walkable, preferably with a curb to mark a clear distinction between road and side of the road.

*****

         

       

        After a couple of miles of walking through the pleasant countryside I reach the junction of Pequot Trail and Anguilla Road. According to William Haynes in The Stonington Chronology, this was the location of Joseph Saxton’s tavern, listed in Tulley’s 1698 Almanac (spelled Sexton’s) as 15 miles from New London to the west and 15 miles from Pemberton’s “in the Narragansett Country” to the east, and which Sarah Knight visited on October 4, 1704. For once Madame Knight had praise for one of the establishments she visited: “ I being arrived at my country Saxton’s at Stonington, was very well accommodated both as to victuals and Lodging, the only Good of both I had found since my setting out.”  All of our eighteenth-century travelers took the opportunity to play on the name of the town in their description of the journey through it. Knight commented that the road in “Stoningtown ... was very Stonny and uneven,” while Hamilton commented that  “this town is properly enough called Stonnington,” and Birket complained of traveling “through a great deal of Stony uneven road.”(3) 

        Pity the lot of the farmer who settled in this aptly named town.  The huge number of stones that seemingly grow so well in New England soil must have been a serious impediment to the ambitious farmer. The lines of stone walls that crisscross the countryside are a testament to years of battle in the fields, a battle that was ultimately lost as the fields were abandoned to nature.  As I wander the countryside I reflect that the scene in front of me would have been drastically different in Hamilton’s day. Rather than endless woods interspersed with a few farms and housing developments, the land would have been extensively cultivated. Hamilton frequently mentions the open views of the country that he has from high points along the road. My views are almost always limited by the presence of trees, which would not have been the case in eighteenth-century New England, where food growing was vital to survival and wood was the primary source of heating fuel. It is somewhat ironic, I think, that between the abandonment of farmland by New Englanders in the last century and the lost practice of burning undergrowth that the Indians utilized to manage the land for their purposes, southern New England may not have had as much forest as it does now for thousands of years! (4)

*****

        A few minutes walk past the site of Saxton’s tavern a country lane on the left side of the road is called Sergio Franchi Drive. I remember Sergio Franchi eight-track cassettes in our house in the 1970s (In hindsight when I think of Franchi I am reminded of the 1970s, especially dinner parties at my family’s house with perhaps mussels in white wine, lasagna, and veal marsala with roast potatoes and asparagus, lots of wine, espressos, and conversations in Italian and English with cigarette smoke filling the house). I discover later that the Italian crooner died here in Stonington of brain cancer in 1990.  His family now operates a scholarship fund in his name for aspiring musicians from the house.

                                                                                                                      

        Shortly, Old Pequot Trail splits left away from Pequot trail for a few minutes, and I am in an even more rural setting, although I can hear the roar of traffic from I95 nearby. Before I reach the Interstate, I reach an area with a beautiful church on the left hand side and a few eighteenth-century houses.  The “Road” church was originally commissioned by the town in 1671, and by the early 1700s there was a church here, although there was not much of a settlement here. The location of the church was the result of a compromise between the various settlements of Stonington, who could not agree where to have the church, so they compromised and built it on the post road at a midpoint between Old Mystic, Pawcatuck, and the few settlers nearer the coast in what is now Mystic village and Stonington Borough, hence the name of the church.

        A brief return to the noise of the modern world as I cross over I95, and then I return to the chipmunks, apples, falling acorns, and stone walls of the Pequot trail. Large rocks abound and the hilly terrain is hard on my feet, especially when I head downhill but the scenery is enjoyable so I grin and bear it. After one particularly high hill I can see that there is a river valley below. I am about a mile from Old Mystic now. According to Prince’s 1732 Almanac, Williams’s Tavern was located seven miles from Pawcatuck bridge, which would be about a mile short of Old Mystic, in this general area. I pass a road called Prentice Williams Drive. Could this be the place? Hamilton had breakfast at Major Williams’s on his way to Boston and dinner on the way back to Annapolis. Dinner in the eighteenth-century meant lunch, for he ate at in the early afternoon, leaving at 3:30 to cross “the little ferry at 5 o’clock.” Supper was the word used for dinner by Hamilton and Birket, who also “dined” at Colonel Williams  “at Stonington being 21 miles where we dined upon salt pork and turnips with thick Cyder to drink, here we crossed Mistick River at a wooden bridge.” The bridge, as well as a promotion for Williams, seem to have arrived in the six years between the journeys of the two men.

        Heading steeply downhill (ouch!) I reach the bridge across the Mystic River, a small stone bridge across maybe fifteen yards of water. Just to the south, however, the river widens dramatically and is lined with salt marsh, making it a much more difficult prospect to cross the river downstream, hence the somewhat indirect road from Pawcatuck to New London. Crossing the bridge brings me to the town of Groton, another large town made up of a series of small villages. Apparently Rhode Island and Connecticut, despite their long rivalry, share some things in common. There are eight miles or so to Groton Center and the Thames River, across which lies New London.  I will save that story for the next entry and end this one watching ospreys circle the salt marsh under the late summer sun from a bench by the river, resting my feet, having a snack and a drink, and gearing up for a few more hours of walking on my first day in Connecticut.  Today the sun seems to belong to me and me alone.