During its evolution from Indian trails to modern interstates, the Boston Post Road, a system of overland routes between New York City and Boston, has carried not just travelers and mail but the march of American history itself. Eric Jaffe captures the progress of people and culture along the road through four centuries, from its earliest days as the King of England’s “best highway” to the current era.
Centuries before the telephone, radio, or Internet, the Boston Post Road was the primary conduit of America’s prosperity and growth. News, rumor, political intrigue, financial transactions, and personal missives traveled with increasing rapidity, as did people from every walk of life.
From post riders bearing the alarms of Revolution, to coaches carrying Washington on his first presidential tour, to railroads transporting soldiers to the Civil War, the Boston Post Road has been essential to the political, economic, and social development of the United States.
Continuously raised, widened, re-routed, and improved for faster and heavier traffic, the road played a key role in the advent of newspapers, stagecoach travel, textiles, mass produced bicycles and guns, commuter railroads, automobiles—even Manhattan’s modern grid. Many famous Americans traveled the highway, and it drew the keen attention of such diverse personages as P.T. Barnum, Benjamin Franklin, J.P. Morgan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Robert Moses.