Ipass norwood7/2/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() The towns south of Boston, particularly Walpole and Wrentham, were different from most towns in New England, as town leaders with some foresight could see that an improved road that steered traffic away from the Old Roebuck Road, and instead passed through their towns, would substantially increase business for merchants in the towns, as well as provide easier access to Boston, the biggest market of them all in eighteenth-century America. As you can imagine, this policy produced mixed results. So it was up to individual colonies and towns in those colonies to improve the roads within their territory to improve transport and increase trade in the colonies. Thus there were no attempts to create a unified road system at the highest levels of government. The government in London, however, had little interest in promoting intra-colonial trade, preferring transatlantic commerce between each colony and the motherland. Forty years later, substantially more people inhabited the interior areas away from the coast and demand increased for more reliable roads. Knight traveled in a time when settlement outside the major port towns was sparse and roads were yet to be improved. Eventually the roads, though still execrable by today’s standards, improved, and new roads were actively constructed to make the distances between towns shorter, less circuitous, and less affected by topography. Men were often required to give a certain amount of time each year working to improve the roads of the town in which they lived. Towns slowly made improvements to their sections of the various roads that passed through their town. Sometimes a trip by land was necessary, and, in the earliest days, few roads existed and the ones that did exist were of poor quality. Traveling through the swampy woods south of Boston in the seventeenth or eighteenth century was no easy task, and many preferred traveling by water to New York and other points in the colonies. That is because our standards rise to match expectations. Roads are always improved over time, even it seems they are awful to us. ![]() Clearly this would not work well for somebody on horseback, nor for the stagecoaches that began to appear in the eighteenth century. The original paths through the woods were narrow and deeply furrowed by centuries of use by small groups of Massachusett, Narragansett, Niantic, or Pequot traveling “Indian file” on paths two feet wide. Indians did not have pack animals and their sole means of land transport was walking. Alexander Hamilton did not walk the Post Road. ![]()
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