The King's best highway
Subtitle: the story of the post road from Boston to New York, the forgotten road that made America
By: Eric Jaffe.
Edition: 1st Scribner hardcover ed.
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 322
ISBN-13: 9781416586142; 9781416586159; 9781439176108
Subjects: Roads -- United States -- History; Transportation -- Social aspects -- United States -- History; Transportation and state -- United States -- History; Social change -- United States -- History; Boston Post Roads -- History; Post roads -- Massachusetts -- Boston Region -- History; Post roads -- New York Region -- History; Boston (Mass.) -- Relations -- New York (State) -- New York; New York (N.Y.) -- Relations -- Massachusetts -- Boston
Description: This book is a look at American history through the prism of the country's most storied highway, the Boston Post Road. It is based on extensive travels of the highway, interviews with people living up and down the road, and primary sources unearthed from the great libraries between New York City and Boston, including letters, maps, contemporaneous newspapers, and long forgotten government documents. During its evolution from Indian trails to modern interstates, the Boston Post Road, a system of over land routes between New York City and Boston, has carried not just travelers and mail but the march of American history itself. The author 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 George 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, improved, rerouted, and widened 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 Benjamin Franklin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, P.T. Barnum, J.P. Morgan, and Robert Moses.^

The author weaves this narrative with a historian's eye for detail and a journalist's flair for storytelling. A cast of historical figures, celebrated and unknown alike, tells the lost tale of this road. Revolutionary printer William Goddard created a postal network that united the colonies against the throne. General Washington struggled to hold the highway during the battle for Manhattan. Levi Pease convinced Americans to travel by stagecoach until, half a century later, Nathan Hale convinced them to go by train. Abe Lincoln, still a dark horse candidate in early 1860, embarked on a railroad speaking tour along the route that clinched the presidency. Bomb builder Lester Barlow, inspired by the Post Road's notorious traffic, nearly sold Congress on a national system of expressways twenty five years before the Interstate Highway Act of 1956.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 271-309).
Table of contents: title: pt. 1. From Indian path to post road; title: The "ordinary way"; title: Of fidelity and fate; title: Benjamin Franklin, postman; title: Inflammatory papers and tavern politicians; title: The general and the blacksmith; title: Setting the business in motion; title: pt. 2. The railroad as highway; title: The great Boston-New York rivalry; title: Toward union; title: Barnum, Morgan, and New England's "invisible government"; title: pt. 3. The nation's road standard; title: Colonel Pope and the good roads movement; title: "Rocks, ruts, and thank-you-marms"; title: Highway Route 1, relocated; title: Changing the face of America; title: Cruising the B-P-R.