The Origin of the Post Road

            Perhaps the greatest obstacle to understanding is familiarity. I do not mean by familiarity intimate knowledge but rather that pleasing sense of comprehension merely owing to long acquaintance. So for instance the all too familiar pattern of living in close proximity to a famous monument that in fact one never visits. I once worked at the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown and virtually every day someone would come in and tell me that they had lived in Boston their whole life but this was their first visit to the monument.  We know it so we do not visit and thus, ironically, we do not know it at all.

        The Boston Post Road fits into this category, familiar yet unknown. Many people can tell you where it is and what it means and most of them are wrong. It is not what people think it is, it does not go where people think it goes. Signs for Post Roads abound, especially in New England. The Boston Post Road is in Attleborough, Massachusetts, on the border with Rhode Island. The Boston Post Road is in Marlborough, Massachusetts, 20 miles west of Boston. It is found on the Southern Connecticut coast and in the hills of Northeastern Connecticut, and in Hartford. It is in the Bronx. All of these are in fact the Boston Post Roads. 

        The Post Road exists in many forms and permutations but there is the original road and it is hidden away; sometimes buried under a strip mall or condo development, sometimes a lost track in the woods. Sometimes it is right under your feet if you are walking in downtown Boston, although it is not called by that name. The first Post Road still exists under the clutter of familiarity, and underneath the many layers of more modern roads, like the lost City of Troy, sits the path taken by the Wampanoag and the Narragansett, Pequot and puritans from Boston to Maine and from Boston to Maryland and even beyond, through the wilderness to the urban oases of New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, New Haven, Newport, and Charleston.

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        Near the old man in the Red Sox jacket hawking roasted nuts and cold drinks wandered a man dressed in a sort of piratical garb. Only he had reflecting shades and dragon feet sandals and a bunch of signs pasted to his body. One said, “tell me your first name and I can spell your last name-$5” Another said “I know your telephone number, your zip code, your age”.  Occasionally a passing tourist would be curious and ask him to perform his trick. Cocodini, as he was known (although he looked and sounded very much like a Foley or Sullivan) would go into a sort of accountant’s trance, pull out a clipboard and ask a couple of questions sotto voce (so as not to give away his secrets I imagine), write a few things down, stare at the clipboard, make his customers laugh a little, and then show them the clipboard. All I could hear in the transaction was “how did you do that?” and see a look of amazement. Then he would collect $5 and wait for the next customer. I saw him make $30 in an hour. I didn’t want to ask him if he knew what I was doing; I wasn’t sure I knew myself and I was afraid what the answer might be.

        Directly behind the Great Cocodini stands a small red brick structure dwarfed by modern skyscrapers.  This building, now called the Old State House, was formerly called the Town House, and was the seat of colonial government in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Town house was also mile 0 in Boston, the point from which all distances were measured. This is where the Boston Post Road begins.

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        Even this part of the story of the Post Road is muddled. For many years a myth has existed concerning a certain stone in the Blackstone Block, on the way to the North End of Boston, about a quarter mile from The Old State House. This stone, embedded in a wall of a building on Marshall Street, is often referred to as the Boston Stone or the zero milestone and is often mistaken for the starting point from which distances from Boston are measured. In fact, it is not, nor has it ever been used for that purpose. George Weston, in Boston Ways believes it to be a grinding stone for paint brought from England in 1700, which was later placed there by the owner of the establishment (1).  Charles Bahne, in The Complete Guide to the Freedom Trail, states that “the stone was forgotten until a tavern owner found it on his property. He named it the Boston Stone, and set it in front of his tavern as an advertisement. It has been there ever since”(2). The present origin point of the distances one sees on signs indicating the distance from Boston for instance on I-95) is the State House on Beacon Hill (the “New” State House, built by Bulfinch in 1797). In Colonial Boston, the starting point for all distances measured to and from Boston was the Town House, at the intersection of State (formerly Great, then King) Street and Washington (formerly Cornhill, Marlborough, Newbury, and Orange Streets) Street, which was and remains the heart of Boston.

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         In order to understand the origins of what became known as the Old Post Road, or Boston Post Road, it helps to understand the geography of New England, the history of settlement by Europeans, and the lives of the people living here at the time of contact by the English who eventually came to control the colony they formed. All of this will unfold as I walk the Post Road and contribute entries to this blog. For our purpose today I need only tell the reader that at the time of the foundation of Boston in 1630, the town was contained entirely on what was called the Shawmut peninsula, surrounded on almost every side by water with the exception of a small spit of land called “the Neck”, which provided the sole means of entry by foot into Boston. Hence the main road in Boston, now called Washington Street, ran from the Town House in a southwesterly direction for one and a quarter miles to the Neck.

        Boston began as and remains an important seaport. From the largest of the wharves, known as Long Wharf, ran Great (later King, now State) Street to the Town House. As Walter Muir Whitehill, in A Topographical History of Boston, emphasizes about the importance of the source of the town’s prosperity “this broad half mile (King Street) was the obvious avenue to Boston from the part of the world that really mattered”(3). The Town House was thus situated at the intersection of the main roads leading into the town by land and by sea.

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        Standing in front of the Old State House I can see down State Street to the Harbor. The most important and imposing building in it’s day, the Old State House now is dwarfed by towers of commerce. It is the second building on the site, replacing a wooden structure built in 1657 which burned in 1711. The seat of government in colonial Massachusetts, the building was also the commercial center of Boston in colonial days as the focal point of traffic from land and from sea. All visitors to Boston would have occasion to pass this building. As we shall see, this building and the surrounding area, the starting point of the Post Road, has played an important role in the evolution of the United States of America. Turning away from the sea, I take a step toward the Old State House. My journey on the Post Road has begun.

Original date of publication April 13, 2010.