THE ROMANCE OF THE ROAD
The traveller in the old stage-coach was not tantalized by the fleeting
half-glimpse of places which we gain in railroad travel to-day. He had
ample time to view any unusual or beautiful spot as he passed, he had
leisure to make inquiry did he so desire, he had also many minutes, nay
hours, to hear any traveller's tale that could be told him by a
fellow-journeyer or by the driver. This last-named companion, going over
the stage road day after day, talking constantly, querying frequently,
grew deeply versed in its lore, its history. He knew the gossip, too, of
each house he passed, he knew the traditions and tales of each locality;
hence in his company every mile of the road had some point of deep
interest.
Roger Mowry's Tavern was the first one established in the town of
Providence. It escaped destruction in King Philip's War, when nearly all
the town was burned, and stood till the present day. When a coach started
out from that old tavern, it passed the burying ground and a dense growth
of barberry bushes which grew along the roadside. There seems to have
been, in many places, a suspicion of uncanny reputation connected with
barberry bushes. In one spot a dense group of bushes was said to harbor a
vast snake; in another it shaded an Indian's grave; a third concealed a
ghost. The barberry was not a native of America; it is an immigrant, and
has the further ill name of blasting any wheat near which it is planted.
The grewsome growth of barberry bushes near Mowry's Tavern was the scene
of the first serious crime of the settlement of Providence Plantations.
The town carpenter, a thrifty and much respected young man named Clauson,
much beloved by Roger Williams, was found dying one winter morning in 1660
near "a clump of barberry bushes" at the parting of the paths "near Roger
Mowry's Tavern." His head was cloven open with an axe, and the dying man
accused a neighbor named Herndon of being the instigator of the crime; and
with a spirit never learned from his old master, the gentle Williams, he
left a terrible curse upon the children and children's children of John
Herndon, that they should ever "be marked with split chins and be haunted
by barberry bushes." An Indian named Wanmanitt was arrested for having
done this terrible deed, and was locked up in the Mowry Tavern. He was
probably executed for it, though the town records only contain a
preliminary story of his trial. With bills for interpreters and for a boat
and guard and powder and shot and liquor, all to go with the prisoner to
Newport jail, the Indian murderer vanishes down the bay out of history.
John Herndon lived on peacefully for many years, branded, doubtless, in
the minds of many; but there is no record that the futile imprecation of
the dying man ever was fulfilled.
As the stage-coach runs along through old Narragansett, it comes to
another scene of crime, of horrible crime and horrible punishment--that of
hanging in chains. This demoralizing sight was almost unknown in America.
You can scarcely read a tale, a history of old English life, without
hearing of men "hanging in chains." That most popular of children's books,
_The Fairchild Family_, has a typical English scene, wherein the solemn
English father, in order to make his children love each other the more,
takes them through a lonely wood to see the body of a man hanging in
chains on a gibbet, a horrible and revolting sight. Travellers on the
Portsmouth Road in England, after the year 1786, passed at Hind Head a
gibbet with three men swinging in chains, three barbarous murderers of an
unknown sailor--not a pleasant outlook for tired riders on the coach. By
the old South Ferry in Narragansett, a man was murdered by a
fellow-traveller. At the inn where they had rested the last night one of
them spent on this earth, a woman had dressed his hair, and she noted a
curious white lock which grew like our artist Whistler's in a thick head
of black hair. On this single identification was built a chain of evidence
which ended in that unusual and terrible sight in the new world, the body
of a criminal hanging in chains. It swung there till the poor bones
dropped to the earth, and finally the great chains rusted apart. Then
schoolboys took the heavy links which had bound a sight they had not
seen, and with equal bravado and apprehension cracked open their winter
store of hickory nuts and butternuts with the last emblem of an obsolete
law.
Not far from this scene is a crossroads which could be viewed from the
stage-coach, but I trust no traveller saw there the execution of a law as
obsolete and as barbaric as hanging in chains.
For on this crossroads took place several of those eccentric, ridiculous
performances known as "shift-marriages." Any widow, about to be married
again, could be free from all debts of her dead husband's contracting by
being married at the crossroads, "clad only in her shift." Sometimes she
was enjoined to cross the King's Highway four times thus scantily clad.
George Hazard, Justice, made entry in the town book of South Kingston,
Rhode Island, that Abigail Calverwell on the 22d of February, 1719, was
taken in marriage "after she had gone four times across the highway in
only her shift and hair low and no other clothing." Think of this poor
creature, on this winter's night, going through such an ordeal. Another
Narragansett widow, Jemima Hill, was married at midnight "where four roads
meet," clad only in her shift. Another entry in a town record-book
specifies that the bride had "no other clothing but shifting or smock."
Let me hasten to add that these marriages were not peculiar to Rhode
Island; they took place in many of the colonies, certainly in Pennsylvania
and in all the New England states.
As the old Narragansett coach sped on through Connecticut, it passed
lonely spots which were noted for other sad tales and traditions, but
were ever of keen interest to all passers-by. For at the crossroads "where
four roads meet," were buried suicides, with a stake thrust through the
heart. This was a cruel old English and Dutch law. We learn from Judge
Sewall all of the public obloquy and hatred of a suicide in Massachusetts.
One poor fellow found dead was buried in disgrace under a pile of stones
at a Connecticut crossroads, but the brand of self-destruction was taken
from him at a later date, when much evidence was secured that he was
murdered.
If our Narragansett coach went over the Ridge Hill, the driver surely
pointed out the spot where a lover once hid his coach and horses till
there rode up from a bridle-path near by the beauty of Narragansett,
"Unhappy Hannah Robinson," who jumped from her horse into the coach and
drove off headlong to Providence to be married. An elopement should end
happily, but the adjective ever attached to her name tells the tale of
disappointment, and it was not many years ere she was borne back, deserted
and dying, lying on a horse-litter, to the spacious old home of her
childhood, which is still standing. And one day down this road there came
hotly lashing his horses a gay young fellow driving tandem a pair of
Narragansett pacers, and he scarcely halted at the tavern as he asked for
the home and whereabouts of the parson. But the tavern loungers peeped
under the chariot-hood and saw a beautiful blushing girl, and they stared
at a vast, yawning, empty portmanteau, strapped by a single handle to
the chariot's back. And soon two angry young men, the bride's brothers,
rode up after the elopers, who had been tracked by the articles of the
bride's hastily gathered outfit which had been strewn from the open
portmanteau along the road in the lovers' hasty flight. Who that rides on
a railway car ever hears anything about elopements or such romances!
Parson Flagg, of Chester, Vermont, made his home a sort of Yankee Gretna
Green; the old stage-drivers could tell plenty of stories of elopers on
saddle and pillion who rode to his door.
[Illustration: Midsummer along the Pike.]
The traveller by the coach learned constant lessons from that great
teacher, Nature. Even if he were city bred he grew to know, as he saw
them, the various duties of country life, the round of work on the farm,
the succession of crops, the names of grains, and he knew each grain and
grass when he saw it, which few of city life do now. He saw the timid
flight of wild creatures, rabbits, woodchucks, squirrels, sometimes a wily
fox. My father once, riding on a stage-coach in Vermont, chased down a
mountain road a young deer that ran, bewildered, before its terrible
pursuer. At night the traveller heard strange sounds, owls and a smothered
snarl as the coach entered the woods--a catamount perhaps. He heard the
singing birds of spring and noted the game-birds of autumn; and in winter
they could watch the broad and beautiful flight of the crows, free in
snowy woods and fields from the rivalry of all fellow feathered creatures.
He saw the procession of wild flowers, though he, perhaps, did not
consciously heed them, and he knew the trees by name. The stage-driver
showed his passengers "the biggest ellum in the county," and "the best
grove of sugar-maples in the state." He pointed out a lovely vista of
white birches as "the purtiest grove o' birch on the road," and there was
a dense grove of mulberry trees, the sole survivors of silk-worm culture
in which were buried so many hours and years of hard labor, so much
hard-earned capital, so many feverish hopes. And towering a giant among
lesser brothers, a glorious pine tree still showing the mark of the broad
arrow of the King, chosen to be a mast for his great ships, but living
long after he was dead and his ships were sunken and rotten, living to be
a king itself in a republican land.
[Illustration: A Vista of White Birches.]
The foot-farer, trudging along the outskirts of the village, is often shut
out by close stone or board barriers from any sight of the flowering
country gardens, the luxuriance of whose blossoming is promised by the
heads of the tall hollyhocks that bend over and nod pleasantly to him; but
the traveller on the coach could see into these old gardens, could feast
his eyes on all the glorious tangle of larkspur and phlox, of tiger lilies
and candytuft, of snowballs and lilacs, of marigolds and asters, each
season outdoing the other in brilliant bloom.
And what odors were wafted out from those gardens! What sweetness came
from the lilacs and deutzias and syringas; from clove-pinks and spice bush
and honeysuckles; how weird was the anise-like scent of the fraxinella or
dittany; and how often all were stifled by the box, breathing, says
Holmes, the fragrance of eternity! The great botanist Linnaeus grouped the
odors of plants and flowers into classes, of which three were pleasing
perfumes. To these he gave the titles the aromatic, the fragrant, the
ambrosial--our stage-coach traveller had them all three.
From the fields came the scent of flowering buckwheat and mellifluous
clover, and later of new-mown hay, sometimes varied by the tonic breath of
the salt hay on the sea marshes. The orchards wafted the perfumes from
apple blossoms, and from the pure blooms of cherry and plum and pear; in
the woods the beautiful wild cherries equalled their domestic sisters.
[Illustration: The Hollyhocks' Promise.]
How sweet, how healthful, were the cool depths of the pine woods, how
clean the hemlock, spruce, fir, pine, and juniper, and how sweet and
balsamic their united perfume. And from the woods and roadsides such
varied sweetness! The faint hint of perfume from the hidden arbutus in
early spring, and the violet; the azalea truly ambrosial with its pure
honey-smell; the intense cloying clethra with the strange odor of its
bruised foliage; the meadowsweet; the strong perfume of the barberry; and
freshest, purest, best of all, the bayberry throwing off balm from every
leaf and berry. Even in the late autumn the scent of the dying brakes and
ferns were as beloved by the country-lover as the fresh smell of the
upturned earth in the spring after the farmer's plough, or the scent of
burning brush.
[Illustration: The Cool Depths of the Pine Woods.]
Fruit odors came too to the happy traveller, the faint scent of
strawberries, the wild strawberry the most spicy of all, and later of the
dying strawberry leaves; even the strong and pungent onions are far from
offensive in the open air; while the rich fruity smell of great heaps of
ripe apples in the orchards is carried farther by the acid vapors from the
cider mills, which tempt the driver to stop and let all taste new
apple-juice.
In the days of the stage-coach we had on our summer journeys all these
delights, the scents of the wood, the field, the garden; we had the genial
sunlight, the fresh air of mountain, plain, and sea; and all the wild and
beautiful sights which made the proper time for travel--the summer--truly
joyful. Now we may enjoy a place when we get there, but we have a poor
substitute for the coach for the actual travelling--a dirty railway car
heated almost to tinder by the sun, with close foul air (and the better
the car the fouler and closer the air) filled, if we try to have fresh
air, with black smoke and cinders; clattering and noisy ever, with
occasional louder-shrieking whistles and bells, and sometimes a horrible
tunnel--it has but one redeeming quality, its speed, for thereby the
journey is shortened.
[Illustration: Taylor's Tavern. 1777, Danbury, Connecticut.]
Cheerful friends on the old roads were the milestones and guideposts.
Milestones had an assured position in social life, a dignified standing.
It would be told of a road as a great honor and distinction, and told
fitly in capitalized sentences thus, "This Elegant road is fully Set with
well-cut Milestones." A few of the old provincial milestones remain, and
put us closely in touch with the past. In Governor Hutchinson's day
milestones were set on all the post-roads throughout Massachusetts.
Several of these are still standing; one is in Worcester, in the heart of
the city, marked "42 Mls. to Boston, 50 Mls. to Springfield, 1771."
Another is in Sutton. It is five feet high and nearly three feet wide. It
is marked "48 mls. to Boston. B. W." The letters B. W. stand for
Bartholomew Woodbury, a genial tavern-keeper of Sutton. It shows a custom
which obtained at that date. It was deemed most advantageous to a tavern
to have a milestone in front of it. Possibly the tale of the stone shown
in its lettering urged wayworn travellers to halt and rest within the
welcoming door. Bartholomew Woodbury's Tavern was a few rods from the spot
marked for the stone, but the government permitted him to set this stone
by his doorside, at his own expense, beside the great horse-block.
Tavern-keeper and tavern are gone, and the old road sees few travellers.
Occasionally some passer-by, inquisitive like myself of the presence of
the old stone, will halt as did the traveller of old, and pull away the
curtain of vines, and read the lettering of this gravestone of the old
Woodbury Tavern.
[Illustration: M. M. Taylor's Milestone.]
Another landlord who appreciated that the milestone served as a magnet to
draw customers to the tavern taproom was Landlord Taylor, who kept the old
tavern known as "Taylor's," in Danbury, Connecticut. The house with the
milestone is shown on page 350 and the milestone alone on page 351.
[Illustration: Peleg Arnold's Milestone.]
Judge Peleg Arnold was one of the most active patriots in northern Rhode
Island during the Revolution; for many years he carried on a tavern at
Union Village, a suburb of Woonsocket, and his house was noted for its
excellence and hospitality. Not far from his tavern to the northward the
"Great Road" from Smithfield into Mendon wound through woods and meadows
and over the northern hills of Rhode Island.
In 1666 this great road was a small foot-path through the woods, and was
indicated by marked trees leading from cabin to cabin; but in 1733 it had
taken upon itself the dignity of a cart-path and then became the subject
of discussions on town-meeting days. Peleg Arnold had been one of the men
to re-lay the old road, and it was near the northern boundary of his farm
that he set up the old milestone shown here. For more than a hundred and
twenty-five years this stone has served to brighten the hearts of
travellers, for they have learned to know that this silent and inanimate
guide can be relied upon as to distances with much more certainty than can
the words of residents in the neighborhood.
When Benjamin Franklin was Postmaster-general, he set an indelible
postmark in many ways on the history of our country; and many mementos of
him still exist. Among them are the old milestones set under his
supervision. He transacted this apparently prosaic business with that
picturesque originality which he brought to all his doings and which
renders to every detail of his life an interest which cannot be exceeded
and scarcely equalled by the events recorded of any other figure in
history.
He drove over the roads which were to be marked by milestones, seated in a
comfortable chaise, of his own planning, and followed by a gang of men,
and heavy carts laden with the milestones. Attached to the chaise was a
machine of his invention which registered by the revolution of the wheels
the number of miles the chaise passed over. At each mile he halted, and a
stone was dropped which was afterward set. The King's Highway, the old
Pequot Trail, was thus marked and set. A few of these milestones between
Boston and Philadelphia are still standing, one in New London, another at
Stratford, and are glanced at carelessly by the hundreds of thousands who
glide swiftly past on wheels bearing more accurate cyclometers than that
of Franklin.
Guide-boards always stood at the crossings of all travelled roads; indeed,
they stood where the roads were scarce more than lines among the grass and
low shrubs. Since our day of many railroads, and above all, since the
interlacing network of trolley lines has spread over all our Eastern lands
where once the stage-coach ran, many guide-boards have disappeared and
have not been replaced. You find them often at the angles of the road
lying flat in grass and bushes; or standing split, one-sided, askew,
pointing the road to the skies, or nowhere. When in trim and good repair
in the days of their utility and helpfulness, they were friendly things,
and the pointing hand gave them a half-human semblance of cheerful aid.
Where the road led through woods or rarely frequented ways, they were
friends indeed, for all ways looked alike, and one might readily go far
astray. The mile of the guide-board was an elastic one, and sometimes a
weary one.
Guide-boards, even poor ones, are still most welcome. No one in the
country ever has any correct estimate of distances; a distance "a little
better than three miles" before you usually increases by an extraordinary
law instead of decreases after you have driven nearly a mile to "about
four mile." The next road-jogger says "nigh on to a mile"; and then you
may be sure a few hundred feet farther on to jump back to a slow and wise
rejoinder of the original distance, "hard on to four mile."
[Illustration: The Watering Trough.]
Another wayside friend of the traveller in coaching days was the watering
trough. It was frequently a log of wood hollowed out, Indian fashion,
like a dug-out, filled with the lavish bounty of untrammelled Nature by a
cool pure rill from a hillside spring. One of these watering troughs is
shown on this page. In the days of the glory of the stage-coach and
turnpike, fine stone troughs chiselled like an Egyptian sarcophagus took
the place of the log dug-out. They had their supply from a handled pump,
which was a more prosaic vehicle than the pipe made of hollowed
tree-trunks which brought the spring-water; but it had also a certain
interest as the water spouted out in response to the vigorous pumping, and
it has been immortalized by Hawthorne. Our artesian wells, and sunken
pipes, and vast reservoir systems are infinitely better than the old-time
modes of water supply, but we miss the pleasure that came from the sight
of the water, whether it was borne to us on the picturesque well-sweep by
wheel and bucket, or old chain pump; it was good to look at as well as to
taste, and it refreshed man even to see cattle and horses drinking from
the primitive trough.
There is always something picturesque and pleasant in an old bridge, and
of historic associations as well. The great logs such as form a wooden
bridge over a narrow stream are the most natural waterspans, those of the
primitive savages. By fallen tree-trunks placed or utilized by the
Indians, the colonists first crossed the inland streams, adding parallel
trunks as years passed on and helping hands multiplied; and finally
placing heavy, flat cross-timbers and boards when hand-saws and sawmills
shaped the forests' wealth for domestic use.
The old arched stone bridges are ever a delight to the eye and the
thoughtful mind. Look at the picture of the old Topsfield Bridge shown on
the opposite page. It was built in 1760 over the Ipswich River. It shows
the semicircle--simplest of all arched forms--which is happily within the
compass and ever the selection of rustic builders. The shallow voussoirs
speak of security and economy rather than of monumental effect; the
irregular shape and size of the stones tell a similar tale, that there was
ample and fitting material near by, in every field. The arched stone
bridge is a primitive structure; the sort of construction that may be
found in the so-called "Cyclopean" walls of earliest Greece; and this very
simplicity is a distinct beauty, that, added to its fitness and
durability, makes the bridge a thing of satisfaction.
[Illustration: Topsfield Bridge.]
How charming are the reflections in the stilly waters, the arch making the
perfect circle, ever an attractive and symbolic form. How cool and
beautiful is the shadowy water under these stone arches; but it cannot be
reached by the rider in stage-coach or on horseback, as can the brook
spanned by a wooden bridge. This has often a watering place which spreads
out on one side of the road, a shoal pool of clear, crystal, dancing
water. The bottom is cut with the ruts of travellers' wheels, but the
water is pure and glistening; the pool is edged heavily with mint and
thoroughwort and a tangle of greenery pierced with a few glorious scarlet
spires of cardinal flowers, and some duller blooms. How boys love to wade
in these pools, and dogs to swim in them, and horses to drink from them.
The wooden bridge seems in midsummer a useless structure, fit only to
serve as a trellis for clematis and sweet brier and many running vines,
and to be screened with azalea, clethra, and elder, and scores of
sweet-flowered shrubs that add their scent to the strong odor of mint that
fills the air, as the sensitive leaves are bruised by careless contact.
[Illustration: The Shadowy Water under the Arches.]
There was a closeness of association in stage-coach travel which made
fellow-passengers companionable. One would feel a decided intimacy with a
fellow-sufferer who had risen several mornings in succession with you, at
daybreak, and ridden all night, cheek by jowl. Even fellow-travellers on
short trips entered into conversation, and the characteristic
inquisitiveness was shown. Ralph Waldo Emerson took great delight in this
experience of his in stage-coach travel. A sharp-featured, keen-eyed,
elderly Yankee woman rode in a Vermont coach opposite a woman deeply
veiled and garbed in mourning attire, and the older woman thus entered
into conversation: "Have you lost friends?" "Yes," was the answer, "I
have." "Was they near friends?" "Yes, they was." "How near was they?"
"A husband and a brother." "Where did they die?" "Down in Mobile." "What
did they die of?" "Yellow fever." "How long was they sick?" "Not very
long." "Was they seafaring men?" "Yes, they was." "Did you save their
chists?" "Yes, I did." "Was they hopefully pious?" "I hope so." "Well, _if
you have got their chists_ (with emphasis) and they was hopefully pious,
you've got much to be thankful for." Perhaps this conversation should be
recorded in the succeeding chapter, but in truth the pleasures and pains
of stage-coach travel ran so closely side by side that they can scarce be
separated. Many pleasant intimacies and acquaintances were begun on the
stage-coach; flirtations, even courtships, were carried on. One gentleman
remembers that when he was a big schoolboy he rode on the coach from
Pittsfield, New Hampshire, to Dover, and he cast sheep's-eyes at a pretty
young woman who was a fellow-passenger. He had just gathered courage to
address her with some bold, manly remark when the coach stopped and a
middle-aged man of importance entered. Soon all other passengers got out
and the three were left in the coach; and the Boy heard the Man recall
himself to the Girl as having been her teacher when she was a child. He
soon proceeded to make love to her, and made her a proposal of marriage,
which she did not refuse, but asked a week's time to consider. "And during
all this courting," said my informant, with indignant reminiscence after
fifty years, "they paid no more attention to my presence than if I had
been Pickwick's Fat Boy."
The pleasures of coaching days have been written by many an English author
in forcible and beautiful language. Thomas De Quincey sang in most glowing
speech the glories of the English mail-coach. He says:--
"Modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach
system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, not,
however, as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge,
resting upon _alien_ evidence; as, for instance, because somebody
_says_ that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are far
from feeling it as a personal experience; or upon the evidence of a
result, as that we actually find ourselves in York four hours after
leaving London. Apart from such an assertion, or such a result, I
myself am little aware of the pace. But seated on the old mail-coach
we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity....
The vital experiences of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts
impossible on the question of our speed. We heard our speed, we saw
it, we felt it a-thrilling; and this speed was not the product of
blind insensate energies that had no sympathy to give, but was
incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest among brutes, in his
dilated nostril, his spasmodic muscles and thunder-beating hoofs."
Nothing more magnificent and inspiring could be written than his _Going
Down with Victory_--the carrying the news of the victory at Waterloo on
the mail-coach to English hamlets and towns; it is a gem of English
literature.