The Roads and Highways.

The Connecticut River and the two other water routes parallel with it served the transportation needs of the towns on their banks, and carried produce for farmers living within a distance of fifteen to twenty miles on either side. In the intervening territory between the three river valleys, all transportation had to proceed overland on the common highways. All roads in the country at this time were poor; those in New England only somewhat less so than in other sections. The task of laying out and repairing highways had been originally entrusted to the town governments. The selectmen of the town determined what roads were necessary and two "surveyors" were annually appointed to clear new roads and to make such repairs as they deemed advisable. No taxes were collected for this purpose, but the surveyors were empowered to call out all the able-bodied men with their teams on certain days "having respect to the season of the year and the weather" to work on the roads.1 In spite of the fines which were imposed for neglecting this duty, many absented themselves and often those who did appear seem to have regarded the occasion as a sort of junketing party.2

in salt, iron and tinplate, linseed oil, paints and varnishes, leather, bottles and paper.

In another issue, that of August 5th of the same year, a general store offers to buy brown tow cloth, 10 firkins of butter, 200 bushels of potatoes, 500 ropes of onions, and 10 three-year-old mules. Other dealers will buy cider, livestock, apples, hay, rags, hides, skins, oak and hemlock bark, and beeswax.

In the columns of the Hartford Courant the same sort of advertisements appeared including, however, a somewhat greater variety of "European goods."

1 See Province of the Massachusetts Bay, Acts and Resolves, 1693–1694. Ch. 6, Vol. I., p. 136. Also Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 1643. Vol. I., p. 91.

2 In many Massachusetts towns this practice of "working out the highway tax" persisted until after the Civil War. In the Report of the (U. S.) Commissioner of Agriculture for 1866 the methods pursued and the results accomplished are described as follows: "No one who has once witnessed the process of 'mending roads' in a small New England country town, needs any argument to convince him that a system more ingeniously devised to accomplish nothing was ever invented. The surveyors, in the first place, are usually elected at the town meetings, and, as the office of surveyor is of no pecuniary profit beyond mere day wages, persons of peculiar skill, could such be found, would not usually accept it. In fact, the farmers of the district take their turns in the office, any respectable man being deemed fully competent. Often some citizen who lives on a road out of repair seeks the office, and is elected, and takes the opportunity to expend most of the tax for the year on his own road, and leaves the rest of the district to be attended to in the future. The surveyor selects, not the season when repairs

As a result, the work, if we can call it work, was most inefficiently done. It was not until about 1775 that this system began to be abolished in Connecticut and provision was made for laying taxes in certain towns for the repair of their roads.1

How the Roads Were Laid Out.

The roads first laid out were those serving the inhabitants of the town in passing from farm to farm and in going to and from the center of the town where stood the meeting house and country store. are most needed, but that which is most convenient for himself and his brother farmers, after their spring work is done, or after harvesting, and notifies every person assessed to come and work out his tax. As the citizens in town meeting fix the price to be allowed for the labor of men and animals in thus working out the taxes, it is usually fixed at the highest prices which the best men and teams could command, and often much higher, every voter who intends to 'work out his tax' having a direct interest to fix a high price, and they constitute a large majority in town meeting. The time appointed 'for working out the highway tax,' as it is rightly termed, arrives, and at eight o'clock a.m. a motley assemblage gathers, of decrepit old men, each with a garden hoe on his shoulder; of pale, thin mechanics from their shoe shops, armed with worn-out shovels; half-grown boys, sent by their mothers, who, perhaps, are widows; with perhaps the doctor, the lawyer, and even the minister, all of whom understand that 'working on the road' does not mean hard labor, even for soft hands. The farmers bring their steers, great and small, with the old mare in the lead, with a cart; and the Irishman drives up with his rickety horse-cart and the mortal remains of a worn-out railroad horse, to do his part. The only effective force on the ground consists of two or three yokes of oxen and a half-dozen men hired by the surveyor with money paid by non-residents, or men whose time is of too much value to themselves to be wasted on the road. Here is the surveyor, who never held the office before, and who knows nothing of road-making or of directing a gang of hands. The work must go on in some way. The roads are soft and full of ruts, or rough with protruding stones. The stones must be covered, and the road rounded up into shape. The cattle are all put to the big town plough, which is set in at the side of the road; the boys ride on the beam, and the drivers put on the lash, and the gutters, half filled with the sand and soil and leaves of a dozen seasons, are ploughed up, the shovel and hoe men waiting very patiently for their turn to work. The teams then stand idle; and this mixture, more fit for the compost heap than anything else, is thrown upon the road, and finally leveled and smoothed by the old men with their hoes; and thus the road is mended. This is not an exaggerated picture of 'working on the road' in many small towns. The occasion is regarded rather as a frolic than as serious labor; the old men tell stories to an audience always ready to lean on their tools and listen. The youngsters amuse themselves by all sorts of practical jokes, among which is the favorite one of overloading the carts, when any carts are used, so as to stick the teams."

'The privilege of imposing such taxes was granted by the legislature in Connecticut. Thirty-one towns received this privilege in the years 1774-1780. See Public Records of the State of Connecticut, Vols. XIV-XVIII.

The next step was to lay out ways of communication from town to town. It was difficult to secure co-operation between the autonomous local governments in this matter, the result being that such roads were often neglected. Hence it became necessary to pass laws providing that new highways from town to town should be laid out, or old ways altered, by a jury appointed by the county court.3 In case the towns to be thus connected lay in different counties, a special act of legislature was necessary, appointing a committee to do the work. This method was not only cumbersome and expensive but often unsatisfactory. In Connecticut, as early as 1750 these methods had to some extent been replaced by immediate action of the legislature in appointing committees to lay out more direct routes between towns in distant parts of the state between which there was considerable travel.“

When the routes had been determined by one or another of these methods, a narrow track was cleared of trees and rocks (in newer towns the stumps were often left standing in the road), and the logs were drawn away to furnish material for causeways and bridges." Thus the roads were made passable for travelers on horseback and for ox-carts. The methods of repairing were equally simple. A contributor to the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society from Holliston, in Middlesex County, about twenty-five miles from

'Dwight outlines the steps in the laying out of roads in his Travels, II. 121–122. 2 See Public Records of Colony of Connecticut. 1684. Vol. III., p. 157. 3 The original provision for this action is found in the Colonial Records of Connecticut, IV. 314–316, and in Massachusetts Bay, A. and R. 1693–1694. Ch. 6. A later act somewhat simplifying this process is found in the same, 17561757, Ch. 18.

4 See Col. Rec. Conn. X. 107. (1752.)

5 As in the case of the town of Woodbury which was required to keep in repair three parallel roads laid out at different times by the Litchfield county court between the towns of Litchfield and Bethlehem. Resolves and Private Laws of Connecticut, 1789-1836. Hartford. 1837. p. 607.

6 As between Hartford and New Haven, New Haven and New London, New Haven and Windham. The most famous of these early "state roads" was that leading from Hartford through Simsbury, New Hartford, Canaan and Norfolk towards Albany, called the Greenwoods Road. In all of these cases there was no appropriation of state money for this purpose, but the towns through which the route lay were ordered to make and repair the road. This, however, they regularly failed to do. So in the case of the Greenwoods Road; although laid out in 1759 it was not constructed until 1764 and in 1766 was in "great want of amendment." Col. Rec. Conn. Vols. XI and XII.

7 Belknap, History of New Hampshire, III. 375-378, describes in detail the clearing of new roads.

Boston, thus described the system in vogue:

the stones, which for years had been thrown out of the way against the walls, are thrown back, each side of the way is ploughed, the stones are covered with dirt and the middle of the road is left the highest.” Roads so constructed and so repaired were bound to be deep with sand in summer and equally deep with mud in the fall and spring. It is no wonder that travelers complained bitterly of them.2

Means of Conveyance.

The primitive sort of conveyances used at this time is perhaps the best commentary on the state of the roads. The farmer did his errands, and sometimes carried his produce to the country store or his grain to the mill, on horseback. The doctor, lawyer and minister made their professional visits in the same way. Except between towns and cities where stage-coach routes had been established,3 journeys both long and short were made in the saddle. For the transportation of bulky produce, ox-carts of a construction substantial enough to defy the worst roads were employed. Chaises with two wheels had been introduced in some towns about the middle of the eighteenth century, but four-wheeled wagons did not make

2 A traveler from Providence, R. I., to Pomfret, Conn., wrote: "In May, 1776, I went to Pomfret, thirty-six miles in a chaise; the road was so stony and rough, that I could not ride out of a slow walk, but very little of the way; I was near two days in going, such was the general state of our roads at that time." Quoted in Field, Edward. The Colonial Tavern. p. 281.

3 Stage-coaches began to run regularly between Boston and the larger towns in eastern New England, especially along the coast, about 1760, and between Boston and New York some ten or twelve years later. Passengers and a small amount of personal baggage, and later, after the establishment of the Federal Post Office in 1782, the mails also were transported in this way. The establishment of these lines must have led to the improvement of the roads over which they passed and later they probably stimulated the building of turnpikes. Otherwise they had little effect upon internal trade.

An instance of the connection between the rise of the stage-coach business and the building of turnpike roads is found in the case of Captain Pease, a pioneer stage-coach driver and owner, who began a line from Boston to Hartford in 1783. Of him a historian of Shrewsbury, Mass., writes: "His long career as a stage driver gave him abundant cause to realize the bad state of the roads and the necessity for better ones. After long and earnest efforts he procured from the Government the first charter granted in the State for a turnpike, and it was laid out in 1808 from Boston to Worcester through South Shrewsbury He lived to see it completed and to see the benefit it was to the public." Ward, Elizabeth. Old Times in Shrewsbury. New York. 1892. p. 55.

their appearance until about fifty years later. They were still objects of curiosity at the time of the War of 1812.1

The Building of Turnpike Roads.

Dissatisfaction with the existing condition of the highways, and with the administrative system outlined above, led in the years 1790-1810 to the building of turnpike roads by individuals incorporated into associations by state charters. The old roads needed repairing; new roads were needed in the newly settled communities in western Connecticut and Massachusetts. The older towns, with the antipathy to paying taxes which had become traditional, were unwilling to burden themselves with the expense of putting the roads into good condition; the new towns were unable.2 Hence they readily adopted the turnpike scheme as a means of getting better roads without resorting to taxation. In reality they were but reviving a medieval practice in public finance, substituting a fee for a tax. That is, they restored the principle of laying the burden of an expense which was or should have been incurred for the benefit of the whole community, upon those particular individuals in the community who benefited most by it. The states turned over to the new companies certain stretches of the highways to be improved and, to reimburse them for this expense, granted them the privilege for a term of years of collecting tolls from live stock, vehicles and pedestrians at toll-gates. The charters did not specify with any great exactness what sort of a road should be constructed, but were very specific as to the number and location of the toll-gates and the tolls that should be charged.

It seemed to be a splendid scheme from all points of view. The community would get improved roads at the expense of trifling fees paid by the users, and when after a term of years the gates had been abolished the roads would still be there, and presumably the community would then find itself able to maintain them. The incorporators would, in the meanwhile, have invested their capital profitably. So attractive did this plan seem that within a few years after the first companies were chartered, agitation for turnpike build

1 See Felt, Joseph. History of Ipswich, Essex and Hamilton (Mass.) Cambridge, 1834. p. 32. Miss Larned tells of the introduction of these novel vehicles in Windham, Conn., in 1809. See also Wood, S. G. Taverns and Turnpikes of Blanford. Published by the author. 1908. pp. 259-261.

2 See Miller, Edward, and Wells, Frederic P. History of Ryegate, Vermont. St. Johnsbury (Vermont). 1913. p. 148.