People complain about Connecticut's roads. I get it. The potholes. The detours. The construction that begins in April and somehow ends in April of the following year. But before you curse your GPS, consider this: getting anywhere in colonial Connecticut could be genuinely life-threatening.
We're talking about a time
when "road conditions" meant snakes, waist-deep mud, fording
unbridged rivers, and a footpath barely wide enough for a horse. And yet,
Connecticut built America's first great transportation network. It started with the King's Highway.
In 1672, New York Governor
Francis Lovelace had a problem: getting a letter from New York to Boston took
forever and often arrived mangled, late, or not at all. Sound familiar? His solution was a monthly postal route, and in
January of 1673 the first rider began to blaze what would eventually become the
Boston Post Road, US Route 1.
Here in Connecticut, that
route followed an ancient Pequot trail, a path Native Americans had kept clear
for centuries, it’s said, by burning back the brush each November. So we didn't build the road. We inherited it. And then we paved over the history with good
intentions and, for a while, added toll booths.
In 1792, Connecticut solved
the pesky problem of "who pays for roads" the way it still does: user
fees. The Mohegan Turnpike was the state's first, and the country’s second,
turnpike: proof that Connecticut has always been eager to be an early adopter
of charging people money to get somewhere. Over the next four decades, roughly
100 private turnpike companies laid some 1,400 miles of toll roads across the
state. Most of those concerns eventually
went bankrupt.
By the early 1700s, Connecticut had three branches of the Post Road threading through the colony: the Upper route through Hartford and Springfield, the Lower route hugging the Sound through Stratford and Saybrook, and a Middle route cutting diagonally through Bolton and Woodstock. The road system was, for its time, impressive. Travel was still agonizing… a trip from Hartford to Boston could eat up several days.
In 1753, it’s said that Benjamin
Franklin himself drove the Lower Post Road in a carriage fitted with an
odometer, standardizing postal rates by distance and ordering stone mile
markers placed along the route. Connecticut's General Assembly then required
every town to erect them. Imagine that:
State Government mandating infrastructure improvements while arguing about who
pays for it. Some things never change.
But the real transportation
superhighway of colonial Connecticut wasn't a road at all. It was the water.
Long Island Sound was our
I-95, only it actually worked. New
London, blessed with deep water and a protected harbor, was one of the colony's
busiest ports. In a single year, 1748 to
1749, 62 vessels departed for foreign ports. Norwich and Middletown, reached by river,
funneled the colony's farms and forests down to waiting ships. New Haven moved goods both north and south.
And what were they shipping? Horses, cattle, lumber, salted beef, and
barrel staves, all headed to sugar plantations in the West Indies. What came back in exchange? Molasses, rum, coffee and, shamefully,
enslaved human beings. The slave trade made Connecticut both prosperous and
complicit in equal measure.
Much of this water commerce
ended, suddenly and violently, in September 1781, when Benedict Arnold sailed
into New London harbor and burned it to the ground. The King's Highway survived. The waterfront never fully recovered.
So, next time you're stuck on
I-95 wondering why our state can't seem to get transportation right, remember:
we've only been at this for 350 years. And
we've always moved but never moved quite fast enough.
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