Entry #52: Mile 214, Norwalk, Connecticut. Walking to Church.
Entry #52: Mile 214, Norwalk, Connecticut. Walking to Church.
The distance between Norwalk and Stamford is given in Prince’s 1732 almanac as 10 miles. This is also the distance in Tulley’s 1698 almanac as well as in Low’s 1767 almanac. Birket says he traveled 10 miles from Norwalk to Stamford while Hamilton “left Norwalk att 7 in the morning and rid 10 miles of stonny road, crossing several brooks and rivulets that run into the Sound, till I came to Stanford (sic).” (1) A few almanacs list a tavern or two in between these points, but the general consensus is that there are ten miles between Stamford, Connecticut and Norwalk, Connecticut. My expert guide for this segment of my journey, Christopher Colles, whose map of the area was drawn starting in 1789, shows the “Presbyterian” church in Norwalk at about the location it can be seen today, on Norwalk Green, at a little under 52 miles from New York City. The “Presbyterian,” or Congregational Church as it is referred to by New Englanders, in Stamford is also shown on Colles’s map in Stamford Center, at just about the 42 mile mark. Hence, by the most accurate early American gauge we have, the distance on Colles’s map between the two churches is calculated to be a little under ten miles.
As my eye follows the road outlined on Colles’s map I note the taverns he has shown along this stretch of the route (seven by my count: Betts’s on Norwalk Green; Reed’s on the west bank of the Norwalk River; Quintard’s and Wentworth’s directly across the street from each other at mile 50, the turn off for “Old Well,” today’s South Norwalk; Young’s at mile 45; Webb’s in Stamford Center; and another tavern run by a Quintard in Stamford Center. Also catching my eye are the “Presbyterian” churches that Colles indicated on the map: one in Norwalk Center, one in Stamford Center, and a third almost exactly halfway between the two at mile 47, in what is today Darien, Connecticut. The presence of a Congregational Church roughly every five miles or so has been a consistent pattern along the road where there is any significant population. In fact the genesis of most towns in New England originates in the desire for people in remote areas of a town to petition for a separate parish church so that the commute on the Sabbath would be reduced.
Take the people of what is today Darien for example. During the first hundred years of settlement anyone living in the area that has since 1820 been the town of Darien would have been obliged to walk anywhere from three to five miles at a minimum to reach either church in Norwalk or Stamford, and to cross rivers and brooks to do so as Hamilton noted. Thus the desire for a church nearer to the houses of the remote families was frequently the first step in the eventual creation of new towns. The residents of Stamford east of the Noroton River and those in Norwalk west of the Five Mile River were granted the right to establish what became known as Middlesex Parish in 1737, and the “modern” church in Darien (built in 1837) sits roughly on the same site as the original church marked on Colles’s map. Judging from the development of churches in New England, three miles seems to be the maximum distance that a person will travel by foot on a regular basis even under duress (church attendance was compulsory in the colonial era).
Taverns were similarly spread out, generally at a distance of three to five miles but the almanac writers often neglected to mention every tavern along the route, hence the ten mile distance given by most observers as the distance between Norwalk and Stamford, with no mention of what became Darien. One or two almanacs mention Young’s or Quintard’s, but most skip them in favor of the taverns located in the major town centers. As I noted above, there are seven taverns on the ten-mile stretch between Norwalk Green and Stamford Center, but generally only two or maybe three are mentioned in any almanac. As one might guess, there was probably a monetary transaction involved that resulted in the prominence of some taverns over others in the almanac listings. Because to judge from the comments of my fellow travelers, the places listed in the area ranged from bad to awful.
Below are two sheets of the seven sheet maps drawn by Christopher Colles in 1789 as part of a projected atlas of the New England states that never materialized as subscriptions were insufficient to cover the costs of production. The top sheet (number 5) shows the road from Boston to New York, often called the Post Road, or the King’s Highway, from roughly what is today the Fairfield/Westport line through Norwalk to the Darien line. The strips are read from right to left and top to bottom to reach New York, as one can see by the mile markers on the map, which indicate the distance to New York from the indicated spot. The bottom sheet shows most of what is today Darien, all of Stamford, and a large section of Greenwich, which was called Horseneck at the time. In all the five strips on these two sheets cover about twenty two miles from mile 58 to about mile 36. A cross indicates an Episcopal Church while an X cross indicates a Congregational Church. What looks like a hangman’s noose is meant to be a tavern sign and indicates a tavern with the name of the proprietor listed. Bridges, townhouses, mills, “gaols”, and blacksmith shops are also indicated on the map, as are creeks, brooks, and rivers, as well as roads that branch off the main road.
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The earliest account of the tavern at Norwalk is by the incomparable Madam Sarah Knight, who visited Norwalk on her way to New York and on on her return trip to Boston in 1703. Of her first visit she says little except that she “Had a dinner of Fried Venison, very savoury. Landlady wanted some pepper in the seasoning, bid the girl hand her the spice in the little Gay cupp on the shelfe.” Strange that the only specific detail about the tavern concerns where the pepper was kept, but then again Madam Knight was strange, and at least she did not rip the place and it’s proprietors. On her return trip through Norwalk, however, she regained her typically critical voice, taking aim at the “timber of a Broken Bridge about thirty foot long, and perhaps fifty to the water” that crossed the Norwalk river, and then proceeding to roast the innkeeper: “I was exceeding tired and cold when we come to our inn, and could get nothing there but poor entertainment, and the Impertinent Bable of one of the worst of men, among many others of which our host made one, who, had he bin one degree Impudenter, would have outdone his Grandfather. And I think this is the most perplexed night I have had yet.” The next morning “after an Intolerable night’s lodging, wee hasted forward,” she concluded her visit to Norwalk by describing the “Indifferent buildings” and giving a back-handed compliment to the citizens of the town, calling them “more refined than in some of the Country towns wee had passed tho’ vicious enough, the Church and Tavern being next neighbors.” (2)
Forty years later, Alexander Hamilton had little nice to say about his stay at Belding’s Tavern on the night of August 29, 1744. His diary entry for this day spends a long paragraph complaining about “a parcell of roaring fellows that came rumbling up the stairs to go to bed in the next room” who “beat the walls with their elbows as if they had a mind to batter down the house, being inspired, I suppose, by the great god Bacchus.” His sleep was so disturbed that he had a bad dream about his horse dying underneath him and was convinced the house was haunted owing to delusions he had of hearing breathing in his room by his bed.
James Birket also ate at John Beldon’s (sic), and was a fan: “a very good house & Civil people. Had a Dr of lamb roasted here... set forward for New York in the afternoon.” (3) Hugh Findlay, surveyor of the postal routes in 1773, notes that a “Mr. Belding” is the postmaster, and concludes from conversations with him that “ in short I find that it is the constant practice of the riders between New York and Boston to defraud the Revenue as much as they can in pocketing the postage of all way letters.” (4) It should be noted again here that taverns frequently served as post offices in colonial America.
Finally, George Washington mentions passing through Norwalk on October 16, 1789, to bait (feed) his horses, but mentions only that “to the lower end of the town Sea vessels come, and at the other end are mills, stores, and an Episcopal and a Presbiterian church.”(5) This is actually quite a helpful bit of information because histories of Norwalk invariably describe the town being settled in the area that is now East Norwalk, which makes the route of the early travelers somewhat curious since they seem to bypass the town. Here a little sleuthing helps me to put all the pieces together and get a clearer understanding of the vagaries of the route in this area. The first thing to notice is that the river is crossed some miles north of the mouth, and then the road turns sharply southwest again. This is a pattern that I have seen before and typically indicates that a bridge was built at a place that once served as a relatively easier fording place for early settlers who likely followed the paths of the Indians who created the trails.
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Norwalk, Connecticut, clockwise from top left: 1. Looking east up Wall Street, which leads uphill to Norwalk Green, which has been Norwalk’s civic center since the burning of the town during the American Revolution. 2. Looking south at the Norwalk River from the bridge. This area was called “The Bridge” for many years when East Norwalk to the south (confusingly) was the center of the town. Travelers through Norwalk would cross the Norwalk River at this point and by the end of the eighteenth century this area had become the main center of Norwalk. 3. The Lockwood-Matthews Mansion just south of Norwalk proper on West Avenue serves today as a park. 4. View west on Washington Street in South Norwalk. Some histories of Norwalk describe the earliest trails through Norwalk passing roughly this way. Since no bridge existed in the colonial era, there would have to have been a ferry across the wide river here. Certainly by the early eighteenth century, travelers traveled over the route two miles to the north in what is today Norwalk proper. Today South Norwalk is known for having gone from a depressed postindustrial area to having a thriving restaurant and cultural scene.
Samuel Richards Weed, in his 250 years of the History of Norwalk, 1651-1901, states that the earliest settlement of the town of Norwalk was in the area today called East Norwalk, about a mile south of Norwalk Green, which became the center after the burning of the town by the British Army in 1779. (6) As the diaries above make clear, visitors to the area before and after the Revolution traveled through Norwalk via a road that bypassed this area entirely and crossed the Norwalk River at the spot where the bridge crosses at Wall Street today. This area was in fact known as The Bridge prior to becoming Norwalk proper as it is today. Weed describes the two earliest road to Fairfield, one which followed a route that took it through East Norwalk and then across the river at a point further south to what is today Washington Street in South Norwalk; however it is clear that a bridge was built by the early seventeenth century farther north, and the northern area, through which the second early road passed, slowly took over as the center of life in Norwalk.
I follow Colles’s map of the early 1790s which clearly shows the bridge crossing at today’s Wall Street. Starting at Norwalk Green near the Congregational church, I follow East Wall Street past the Norwalk Historical Society downhill where I reach the bridge across the river that once spooked Sarah Knight. Downtown Norwalk has an interesting and curious mix of Latin American restaurants and new age spiritual bookstores and cafes. Piles of recent snowfall and icy sidewalks make the walk a bit treacherous, but there are still plenty of people on the street. They mostly seem to be black or Hispanic which dovetails with the census data that indicates that the area around downtown Norwalk is made up of a population that is about half Hispanic and about 30% black, with only about 20% non-Hispanic whites living in this area. The downtown area is modestly vibrant but seems to have seen better days. Overall the architecture is nice but there is really not much retail beyond restaurants, a jewelry store, and a couple of low-end clothing stores and furniture stores. No Talbot’s or Victoria’s Secret here. A little south of the downtown Norwalk area I pass Matthews Park, which was once the estate of the inhabitants of the Lockwood-Matthews Mansion, a large stone building in the middle of the park. I pass under Interstate 95 which crosses Norwalk between South Norwalk and Downtown Norwalk, and reach the junction of West Avenue and Main Street, the latter street marking the entrance to the South Norwalk Historic District, a fine collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century manufacturing buildings that have been readapted as restaurants and nightclubs, bakeries, and cute stores selling art and lots of other exciting stuff I never buy (unless my sister produces it). This area has been styled “SoNo” and is what everybody in Norwalk tells you to go see when you are visiting. I find it pleasant enough and even grab a coffee and a pastry at a little Italian cafe, but once you have been to Quincy Market or South Street Seaport or any number of revitalized previously moribund waterfront districts, it is not exactly “vaux le voyage” as the Michelin Guide would say; However, contemplating the alternatives, it seems to be a good addition to the town, so I enjoy its modest charms and move on down the road.
Washington Street, which is the name of the road that emanates from the bridge crossing the river here in South Norwalk and crosses Main Street in the heart of “SoNo” was once an important Indian trail and the trail from the northern bridge from whence I have just come along West Avenue merges with Washington Street and heads very steeply uphill on what becomes Flax Hill Road. The split of West Avenue and Main Street is shown on Colles’s map, where he refers to Main Street as the road to “Old Well,” which apparently was an older name for the South Norwalk area. Two of the taverns I mentioned above, Wentworth’s and Quintard’s, were located across the street from each other near this junction, which is also the fifty mile mark on Colles’s map. After Main Street, West Avenue changes name to Martin Luther King Drive, which I follow for a few yards until I reach the Washington Street, MLK Drive, and Flax Hill Road junction. As I walk along the short stretch of MLK Drive, I can’t help but think of the various jokes Chris Rock tells about streets named in honor of Dr. King. One goes something like this: “When a white friend told me [Chris Rock] that he was on MLK Boulevard and asked me for directions my response was run!” In another version of the joke Rock basically says “I don’t care where you live in America, if you’re on Martin Luther King Boulevard, there’s some violence going on.” It is a sad commentary on the fate of streets across the country named for the leader of the Civil Rights Movement in America that his statements bear more than a grain of truth and that as soon as I saw the name of the street I knew that the neighborhood would be majority non-white, which in fact it is, according to Census Bureau statistics; However, although I spend a mere five minutes on the street, it seems no different from the vast majority of streets I have traveled on for this trip: lots of traffic, some chain stores in a strip mall, and an occasional historic house or cultural monument attesting to the length of time the road has passed through the area, in this case an old Baptist Church which stands on the spot Wentworth’s tavern once occupied. No gang-bangers or drug deals that I could see, just people trying to get to work on a cold winter’s morning.
Speaking of taverns, this seems like a good time to relate what few facts I have learned about some of the proprietors. John Belding, whose tavern, the Sign of the Sun, was mentioned above by a couple of the earlier travelers, was not only a postmaster for the town of Norwalk, but also a tavern keeper, albeit one whose tavern received mixed reviews. His tavern is listed in almanacs as early as 1687, which indicates he may have been a second or third generation inn keeper. His tavern is not listed on the Colles Map and, from various bits of information I picked up in the Norwalk Library (which may have been the site of his tavern, incidentally), it seems he may have been a Tory sympathizer, of whom there were many more than is commonly assumed. (7) Given that the town was burned by the eventual losing side, Belding may not have been a popular figure in Norwalk which might explain the absence of his tavern. This is all conjecture, but I enjoy the idle speculation as I wander along Flax Hill Road on this cold winter’s day.
Another tavern keeper (two in fact: one in Norwalk and one in Stamford) bears the unusual name Quintard, which is of course of French derivation. A Pierre Quintard, baptized in the French church in New York in 1699, came to be called Peter and moved to Old Well, now South Norwalk in 1737-8 as a goldsmith. According to the Reverend Charles Selleck in his history of the town, Peter Quintard’s son Peter and grandson James ran a tavern, which might explain the two taverns. Selleck states it was the “only tavern in Old Well” although it is clear there were two by 1789 from Colles’s map. This tavern was on what Selleck claims was originally called the “Ponasses” path, which ran along West Avenue and Flax Hill Road. (8) I noticed on an 1847 map of Norwalk that there is a Quintard Pier in South Norwalk near Washington Street indicating that the Quintard family also had seagoing interests as well. Quintard’s is listed in Low’s 1767 tavern list, two miles past a Ketchum’s tavern, which would be on Norwalk Green according to my calculations.
Colles also shows a Reed’s tavern, which may be on the site of the former Belding’s tavern in what is today Downtown Norwalk. Elsie Danenberg tells us it was starred in Low’s 1800 almanac, indicating it was a rest stop for the stage coach line established by Charles Beekman in 1789. She also states that the stage took a week to reach Boston from lower Manhattan and compares that unfavorably to the express train, which at the time she was writing (1929), could make the journey in six hours. (9) As I discussed in the previous entry, today’s train trip takes three and a half hours on a good day.
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Along Flax Hill Road in Norwalk, Connecticut. Top left is a pretty brook that passes under the road near Keeler Avenue. Colles shows a brook at about the same distance along from Quintard’s tavern between mile 49 and 48. Top Right is a house along the road from 1780. Directly opposite (not shown) is another house from 1748. A house owned by a Raymond is shown on Colles map in roughly the same area as these houses as is one owned by Waring Whitman, Col. Hays, and Richards. The above house is at the junction of Richards Avenue and Rowayton Avenue, near Shady Brook, which must be the source of the neighborhood’s name, Brookside. On maps this is also called the Five Mile River and marks the boundary of Darien and Norwalk. Colles shows a similar junction near a river at mile 48. Bottom left is a mailbox indicating I am in Darien as Flax Hill Road becomes Old King’s Highway North here. Bottom right is the Jonathan Bates House from 1705 at 148 Old King’s Highway North in Darien.
After the sharp climb up the hill, Flax Hill Road levels out for a while, and I pass through a residential neighborhood. After a few minutes I reach a curious stretch of sidewalk that winds up a sharp incline (see picture above) and passes a farmhouse which is being restored and what appears to be a community garden. I head back down Flax Hill and cross a lovely brook and then reach a junction with Richard’s Avenue and Rowayton Avenue where a couple of eighteenth-century houses sit on opposite sides of the street. Colles’s map shows a junction near a river where a number of houses are located so perhaps the house on my left is the same house as the one on the map owned by a Waring. Soon I reach Shady Brook which I believe is also called the Five Mile River. I pass the Reed house from 1790 soon thereafter, which must be the same house as the one just past the river on Colles’s map owned by one, you guessed it, Reed. This area is at mile 48 on Colles’s map, and, as the name of the street is now Old King’s Highway North, I know I must be in the town of Darien, which I mentioned earlier was formed from part of Norwalk and part of Stamford in 1820.
Darien was originally known as Middlesex Parish, and indeed the area is referred to as Middlesex on Colles’s map. After a few minutes walk through a lovely old neighborhood which holds a number of colonial era houses I reach Interstate 95 again, which I cross over this time. Then I turn left just over the highway before I reach Route1, onto Old King’s Highway North, which passes behind Trader Joe’s and then passes the well-named King’s Highway Tennis Club. After a few more minutes I reach the First Congregational Church in Darien, which I discussed above. Colles shows the church at mile 47, which is five miles from my starting point at the Congregational Church on Norwalk Green. It seems a good place to end this entry and save the remaining five miles of my walk to Stamford for the next entry. Five miles to the next church. Three hundred miles down. Forty seven miles to the finish line. A lot of churches come and gone.
Darien, Connecticut. Top left is the King’s Highway Tennis Club on, you guessed it, Old King’s Highway. Top right is the First Congregational Church of Darien, originally Middlesex Parish. This building dates from 1837 and replaced the original church of 1744 at the same location.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Walking the Post Road
A stretch of sidewalk “curvingly courses” alongside Flax Hill Road in Norwalk, on the way to Darien.
“ Before the pale-face set foot on Norwalk soil there was here already a field and forest path that curvingly coursed the future settlement site from west to east”
Rev. Charles M. Selleck in Norwalk (1896), 34.
Distance Walked in the Entry: 4.62 miles
Total Distance Walked in Connecticut: 129.40 miles
Total Distance Walked for this Project (from Boston): 300.0 miles !!
Distance Remaining to New York: 47 miles
Notes
1.Alexander Hamilton, Itinerarium, 169. August 30, 1744.
2.Sarah Knight, Journal of Madam Knight, 72. Outward bound trip December 6, 1703; return trip December 22/23 1703.
3.James Birket, Some Cursory Remarks, 38. October 11, 1750.
4.Hugh Findlay, Journal kept by Hugh Findlay, 45. November 17, 1773.
5.George Washington, Diary, October 16, 1789.
6.Samuel Richards Weed, The History of Norwalk for 250 years, 1651-1901 (South Norwalk: C.A. Freeman, 1901).
7.Deborah Wing Ray and Gloria P. Stewart, Norwalk: Being an Historical Account of That Connecticut Town (Canaan New Hampshire: Phoenix Publishing for the Norwalk Historical Society, 1979), 67.
8.Reverend Charles M. Selleck, Norwalk (published by the author, Norwalk, CT, 1896, reprinted by the Higginson Book Company, Salem, MA), 420-1
9.Elsie Nicholas Danenberg, The Romance of Norwalk (New York: The States History Company, 1929), 179.