Route Descriptions: New England

 Route descriptions courtesy of Mark Hansen

Troy to Brattleboro, Vermont: The namesake of the Hudson River was the English explorer Henry Hudson. In 1609, he sailed the Halve Maen (“Half Moon”) 125 miles up the river to Kinderhook – which he named – and continued in the ship’s boat to today’s Troy, another 20 miles. He was in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, hence the name of his ship. The Dutch merchants had hired him to search for a supposed Northwest Passage to the Orient. It made a certain amount of sense for Hudson to consider the river as a possibility – the slow-flowing Hudson is tidal as far as Troy – but it did not prove to be. His voyage, however, was a basis for the Dutch claim (asserted in 1614) to the American colony it called New Netherland. 

The ride route follows the river north until opposite Waterford, the origin of the New York State Canal. It turns east on Plank Rd: in the early 19th century, roads were planked – decked with wood over stringer beams – for easier passage over soft, marshy, or rocky ground. It continues as Cooksboro Rd. At its end, on the left 300 yards before the turn onto Rt 7, is a historic farm, the Coletti–Rowland–Agan Farmstead. The Tomhannock Reservoir was built in the early 1900s to supply water to Troy and other communities in Rensselaer Co. The folk art painter Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robinson Moses) lived most of her life in the town of Hoosick. She started painting at the age of 73. In 1938, a New York City art collector saw her paintings in a drugstore in Hoosick Falls, 6 mi north of the route on Rt 22. He bought them all, and several more directly from her at her home in Eagle Bridge (4 miles northwest of Hoosick Falls), paying $3 to $5. The next year, the Museum of Modern Art displayed three of in a show of “Contemporary Unknown American Painters,” launching her to fame. 

During the Revolutionary War, in 1777, an American militia under Gen John Stark surprised and routed British troops (mainly Hessian mercenaries) at the Battle of Bennington, fought in Rensselaer Co about 4 miles north of Mapletown (on the route), about two and a half miles west of North Bennington, Vermont. (The boundary between New York and Vermont was indistinct in this period.) The engagement set back a British campaign to secure control the Hudson Valley and contributed to the surrender of redcoat Gen John Burgoyne at Saratoga two months later, the first major defeat of a British army. 

Vermont was admitted to the Union as the 14th state in 1791, the first state that was not an original colony. It is named for the Green Mountains. Before the Revolution, the colonial Province of New Hampshire and Province of New York both laid claim to the land west of the Connecticut River and north of Massachusetts and both made grants of land to settlers. The first of the New Hampshire Grants in 1749 was for a southwestern town named in honor of Gov Benning Wentworth, Bennington. In 1764, King George III sided with New York in the dispute. The famous Green Mountain Boys led by the patriot Ethan Allen began in 1770 as a militia that used arson and violence to defend the New Hampshire grantees and discourage New York settlers and speculators. In 1777, representatives of the holders of New Hampshire Grants declared Vermont an independent republic. Although Vermont acted in many respects as a sovereign state, Vermonters (including Allen and the Green Mountain Boys) fought in the cause of American independence. Under Article IV, Section 3 of the US Constitution, its admission to statehood required the settlement of New York’s claims on the territory, which Vermont negotiated to New York’s satisfaction. Most of the 62 grantees of the first New Hampshire Grant that created Bennington were residents of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The first settlers in 1761 were Congregational Separatists – Puritans who rejected the Church of England – from Hardwick (near Worcester) and Amherst, Massachusetts. 

The route goes straight through the Old Bennington Historic District (the original settlement) and the Downtown Bennington Historic District. (The SAG is just on the other side of the Downtown District.) The town has a 306’ stone obelisk commemorating the Battle of Bennington, erected in 1891. (It is about 300 yds north of the Old Bennington Historic District.) Bennington College is in the town of North Bennington, a few miles north. It was a private women’s liberal arts college from its founding in 1932 until 1969, when it began also to admit men. The first coeducational class had 503 women and 53 “coeds.” 

Outside Bennington, the route winds up the western slope of the Green Mountains along streams that flow west toward the Hudson, up to the crest at Woodford. East of Woodford, the streams flow east toward the Connecticut. Vermont Hwy 9, on which the route passes, is known as the Molly Stark Trail. She was the wife of Gen John Stark, the victor of the Battle of Bennington, who rallied his men before the battle saying, “There are your enemies, the Red Coats and the Tories. They are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow!” (John Stark survived the battle and the war.) 

The second SAG stop is in Wilmington, a ski resort town in Windham Co. As you approach the town, to your right across the West Branch of the Deerfield River, you will see the Hoot, Toot, and Whistle Trail, a hiking trail on the bed of the Hoosac Tunnel and Wilmington Railroad, which was known by its initials as the “Hoot, Toot, and Whistle,” or alternatively, the “Hold Tight and Whimper.” Ten miles east of Wilmington, on Rt 9, is the tiny town of Marlboro, known for the classical music festival founded by violinist (and conductor) Adolph Busch and pianist Rudolph Serkin (Busch’s son-in-law). After the SAG, however, the ride continues on Rt 100. Dover is another ski resort town. The 2002 Olympic champion snowboarder Kelly Clark trained at the Mount Snow Academy in Dover.  

At Williamsville Station, the route turns onto Rt 30, which follows the West River into Brattleboro. In West Dummerston, the Lydia Taft Pratt Library is in the town’s old school building. Lydia Pratt was a teacher at area schools, one of whose “wishes at the last was that the little library of books which she had used as a teacher might be brought back to West Dummerston and used as the nucleus of a village library.” Just past the Iron Bridge, Stickney Brook Rd would take you to Old Jelly Mill Falls, a 40’ cataract that was once the site of a mill that crushed fruit for jelly. During the coldest part of the winter, the expanse of ice at the mouth of the West River in Brattleboro is crowded with shanties for ice fishers. 

The first European settlement in the area was Fort Dummer, a blockhouse and stockade erected in 1724 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony to defend the Connecticut River during Dummer’s War, a conflict between the colonists and the Wabanaki Confederation, an alliance of Algonquian tribes native to the region. The town was one of the New Hampshire Grants and was chartered in 1753. In the 19th century, the falls on Whetstone Brook provided power for manufacturing mills. Two important local companies printed Bibles and manufactured reed organs (and later, pipe organs). Brattleboro was the birthplace of the architect Richard Morris Hunt, best known for two lavish homes for members of the Vanderbilt family, The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, and the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, the largest private residence in the United States at 178,900 sq ft. 

In 1940, Ida May Fuller, a retired teacher and legal secretary in Brattleboro, received the first Social Security check ever issued, in the amount of $22.54. Another Brattleboro woman, Emma Bailey, was America’s first female auctioneer. Her first sale at her first auction was a rocking chair, which went for $2.50. She wrote a memoir titled, “Sold to the Lady in the Green Hat.” The most notable – and surprising – resident of Brattleboro, however, was the English writer Rudyard Kipling, known for his exotic tales of India, where he was born. In 1892, he married a Brattleboro woman, Carrie Balestier, the sister of a man with whom he had collaborated in authoring a book. They lived in a shingle-style house he named Naulakha, after the book he wrote with his (by then late) brother-in-law, the plot of which involved the Naulakha Pavilion in the Lahore Fort in Mughal India (now Pakistan). Kipling wrote his best-known work, The Jungle Book (1894), in Brattleboro, as well as other books and stories. The couple lived in the home until 1896, when a dispute with another brother-in-law soured their experience and they left for England. The home is on Kipling Rd, about a mile north of the hotel.

Brattleboro to Burlington, Massachusetts: Today is the first and last tristate ride of the tour, made possible by the compact sizes of the New England states. It begins by taking you through Brattleboro’s Downtown Historic District on Main St, facing the Connecticut River. You can see the cataracts on Whetstone Brook as you cross it on Main St before turning left onto the Brattleboro Bridge across the Connecticut River. Ahead as you cross into New Hampshire is Mount Wantastiquet (1335’). The Connecticut River is the longest in New England, originating in a small pond in northern New Hampshire 300 yards below the border with Canada. Its name is a corruption of a word meaning “beside the long, tidal river” in the language of the Mohegans, an Algonquian people native to the area around the river’s mouth in southern Connecticut on Long Island Sound. 

New Hampshire came into being in 1629 as a proprietary colony, meaning a grant of land to a person or corporation, in New Hampshire’s case, an English sea captain named John Mason, who never visited. New Hampshire is the ninth state. As the ninth state to ratify the Constitution, it was the decisive vote under Article VII, which required ratification in nine of the 13 states (two thirds) for adoption. Perhaps today you’ll be lucky and hear its name pronounced with a real Yankee accent, “N’Ham-sha.” Hinsdale’s Post Office at 13 Main St (on the route) is the oldest in continuous operation in the same building, from 1816. In the village of Ashuelot, a 178’ covered bridge from 1865 crosses the Ashuelot River on Bolton Rd just south of Rt 119, the ride route. 

In Winchester, the colonial revival Center Church (on the left after the route turns right off Main onto Richmond) is on the site of a Universalist Church meeting house where in 1803, a Universalist conference reluctantly adopted a statement of the principles of the faith called the Winchester Principles. Universalism emerged in New England in the 18th century. It professes the doctrine of universal salvation, the belief that a loving God would never create people in his own image only to damn them to punishment for eternity, a theological challenge to the doctrines of election and predestination held by Calvinist denominations like New England’s Puritans. Past Richmond, a road branches off northeast to Rhododendron State Park, a nature preserve with a 16 acre stand of native rhododendrons. 

The route through Fitzwilliam passes its unusually picturesque New England common (or “green”) surrounded by a dozen old houses, the town library, and the Greek Revival Third Fitzwilliam Meetinghouse, built as a church in 1817 with a bell cast by Paul Revere in its belfry, now used as the town hall. Near the town is one of the oldest granite quarries in the Granite State. After the first SAG, Rt 119 passes through the town of Rindge (pronounced “rinj”) but does not enter the village. Across Pearly Lake (on the left) is Franklin Pierce University, founded in 1962 and named for the only American president from New Hampshire, who was born in neighboring Hillsborough Co. A northern Democrat, Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and supported other pro-slavery measures. He made himself so unpopular that his party declined to renominate him in 1856. He is regarded by historians as one of our worst presidents. 

In the 19th century, Rindge’s economy was dependent on lumber:  the town had thirteen sawmills, thirteen shingle mills, six stave mills, two planing mills, and several clapboard mills. Most of us are probably familiar with the main elements of Massachusetts’s history: the founding of the Plymouth Colony by Puritans seeking freedom to practice their faith; the arrival of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower at Plymouth in 1620, the aid received by the emigrants from Massasoit and Squanto and other Native Americans; and the organization in 1629 of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first colony chartered by the English whose governors resided in the colony itself. Massachusetts likely took its name from a Wampanoag word meaning “near the great hill.” Massachusetts was the sixth state to join the Union in 1788. Inside Massachusetts, 1832’ Mount Watatic (on your left) is a geological feature called a monadnock, a solitary knoll or mountain that rises from a slope or a plain. 

The route veers from northcentral Massachusetts into the Boston area from the northwest. The entire route passes through a single county, Middlesex, the most populous county in New England and the seventh most populous county east of the Mississippi, after Cook (Ill., Chicago), Miami-Dade (Fla.), Kings (N.Y., Brooklyn), Queens (N.Y.), Broward (Fla. Fort Lauderdale), and Wayne (Mich., Detroit). Into the early 20th century, Ashby was a town of dairy farms and apple orchards. Forty-five linear mi from Boston, it is now an exurban bedroom community. Townsend was named for Charles Townshend, the English secretary of state. The residents deleted the “h” from the town’s name in 1767, when Townshend, as chancellor of the exchequer, imposed additional taxes on the American colonies to fund their administrative expenses. 

The second SAG is just beyond Townsend. The Nashua River flows northeast toward its junction with the Merrimack River in southeastern New Hampshire. The effluent from paper mills and dye works upstream once gave the Nashua various rainbow hues. Groton is an upscale bedroom community for workers in Boston’s tech sector on Route 128. Groton was subject to Abenaki attacks during King Phillip’s War (1676), King William’s War (1694), Queen Anne’s War (1704), and other conflicts between the European colonists and the indigenous peoples of the area. In 1775, 101 Groton men marched toward Concord and Lexington but they arrived too late to participate in the action. Groton School, southwest of the town, is one of the top boarding schools for the sons (and now daughters) of the blueblood elite: its alumni include Franklin Roosevelt and several members of his family and his cousin Theodore’s family; Dean Acheson, Francis Biddle, Douglas Dillon, Charles Barney Harding, W Averill Harriman, Robert R McCormick, Henry Sturgis Morgan, Robert Medill Patterson, and John Hay Whitney, to name only the top government officials and founders of major companies. 

A mile distant north (left) of the turn from Lowell Rd onto Graniteville Rd is a 151’ geodesic sphere that encloses the Haystack Radio Telescope. (It is not visible from the road, but a left turn at the intersection onto Millstone Rd will take you right to it.) Built originally for the Air Force, it is now operated by MIT. Six mi north of South Chelmsford is Lowell, Massachusetts (originally named East Chelmsford). Located on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers, Lowell was the epicenter of the country’s textile industry in the 19th century. “Mill girls” from New England farm families and immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and French Canada tended the spindles and looms. The National Park Service’s Lowell National Historical Park preserves the history and tells the story. 

The day’s destination, Burlington, is a community on Route 128, Boston’s technology corridor. Three miles south in Lexington is where, on April 19, 1775, British troops fired on American Minutemen, drawing the first blood in the American Revolution. Five miles further on, in Concord, at the North Bridge, the redcoats met a much larger force, which put them to rout: “By the rude bridge that arched the flood, / Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, / Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world.” Concord was also the home of two of America’s leading men of letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson – the quotation is the first stanza of his poem, “Concord Hymn” – and Henry David Thoreau. For two years in 1845 to 1847, Thoreau lived his simple life in his cabin on Walden Pond on the edge of Concord. A marker in town identifies the location of the Concord Jail, where Thoreau spent a night in 1846 for refusing to pay his taxes as a protest against the Mexican-American War, an act of “Civil Disobedience” that he addressed in his famous essay, one that today’s protesters would do well to contemplate. (Concord is home as well to ATA Cycles, where Husam outfitted me with my Storck.)

Burlington to Revere: Today’s ride is the final 0.6 percent of the journey from sea to shining sea, from the Pacific at Manhattan Beach to the Atlantic at Revere Beach. (How I wish I had been with you the entire way.) It passes along centuries-old thoroughfares through leafy suburbs like Lexington and Winchester then east through the middle-class community of Medford and the working-class suburbs of Malden and Revere. Paul Revere made his famous midnight ride to warn of the British advance toward Concord along High St in Medford, a few blocks south of the route. Medford is the home of Tufts University, whose campus is in the southern part of the city. Fannie Farmer, she of the eponymous cookbook, took up cooking after suffering a stroke while she was a high schooler in Medford. 

Malden has long had a substantial immigrant population, Irish and Italian a century ago, Brazilian, Chinese, Haitian, Indian, Pakistani, and Moroccan today. A block north of the route, at Salem and Main, is the Converse Memorial Library, a handsome red sandstone structure by Henry Hobson Richardson (the architect of Trinity Church in Boston) in his Romanesque style. The artist Frank Stella, famous for his arcing steel sculptures, was a native of Malden. Revere has long been an enclave for successive waves of immigrants, first English, Irish, and German, then Italian and Jewish, and now South American and Asian with a mix much like Malden’s. The town was originally a part of Chelsea, splitting off as the separate town of North Chelsea in 1856. It became Revere in 1871, named for the patriot who sounded the warning of the mobilization of British regulars in 1775, despite Revere’s having no connection to the place. (He was a silversmith from Boston and his ride toward Concord passed through Cambridge, Somerville, and Malden.) 

A favorite son of Revere’s early era as North Chelsea was Horatio Alger, the author of the stirring tales of rags to riches that are now denoted by his name. Revere Beach, the destination, is the oldest public beach in the country, established in 1896. In the early and middle 20th century, an amusement park was across from it. The amusement park had a Ferris wheel and a series of notable roller coasters, including the Cyclone, the first to top 100’ in height, and the Lightning, one of the “Terrible Trio” designed by Harry Traver, with his trademark twists and tight turns. If you are staying extra days in the area, you’ve probably already examined the attractions in the Boston area. Jeff and Marie Claude, of course, are the group’s experts. As an area resident of much briefer tenure, I’ll mention a couple gems that might otherwise escape your notice: the home and office of Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York’s Central Park (and many other notable parks and campuses), in Brookline, a National Historic Site; and the astonishing, exquisite collection of models of flowers and plants in glass at the Harvard Natural History Museum in Cambridge.