Postscripts

HISTORY

They are everywhere around us, these unnoticed reminders of the past. You will not have to go very far from your dooryard to find them. They began as Indian paths long before the white man came. Improved as horse trails for use by post riders and designated as post roads, they were later widened to accommodate wagons and stagecoaches. Post roads were the sinews that linked the original thirteen colonies. After independence, they helped to bind new states and territories together.

With saddlebags full of letters, the first post rider left New York for Boston with on January 22, 1673. He arrived there fifteen days later, having made his way through hostile Pequot Indian country. In 1785, the first stage to Boston began operating, using little more than a wagon.

Roads were eventually improved and extended. Dirt roadbeds and unbridged streams became all-weather roads with permanent spans, often financed with the proceeds of lotteries. The Boston Post Road became part of the main post road from Wiscasset, Maine, to Savannah, Georgia. Designation of a road as a post road was highly desirable, for it brought coveted postal service to the burgeoning communities along its route. In 1792, when the nation's first postal law was enacted, less than 6,000 miles of post roads existed and only 195 post offices.

Two major post roads led from New York City and crossed Westchester, one heading to Boston and the other to Albany. Except for occasional straightening, modern highways follow these same paths. Several minor east-west post roads led to ports on the Hudson. One famous terminus of the Boston and the Albany Post Roads in New York City was John Fowler's tavern, at the southern end of the Bowery. Stagecoaches leaving there drove north through the sparsely settled farm country of Manhattan until they reached the King's Bridge at the northern tip of the island. After crossing Spuyten Duyvil Creek, the two post roads parted.

The post road to Albany continued on through Yonkers and a succession of quiet Hudson River hamlets--Dobbs Ferry, Irvington (then called Dearman), Tarrytown, Sparta, Sing Sing, Collabaugh Landing (Croton)--to Peekskill and thence inland to Fishkill and beyond. The Albany Post Road is essentially today's Route 9.

The post road to Boston proceeded east from the King's Bridge through West Farms to Eastchester and northeast to New Rochelle, Mamaroneck, Rye, Port Chester (then called the Saw Pits) and into Connecticut. The Boston Post Road largely followed what is now Route 1 to New Haven. Here, travelers had a choice of three separate routes to Boston.

Finding their financial resources inadequate to meet growing needs, the states chartered turnpike companies to build roads with private capital and to collect tolls as a return on their investment. By 1821, New York could boast of some 4,000 miles of such improved roads. The first turnpike company in Westchester County, the first county north of New York City, was the Westchester Turnpike Company, organized in 1800 to build a road from East Chester to the Byram River. In 1806, the Highland Turnpike Company was incorporated "for the purpose of making a good and sufficient road" from Kingsbridge to the city of Hudson.

Specifications for the building of turnpikes were detailed. Milestones had to be erected, and tollgates could be no closer than every ten miles. The bridge over the Croton River was to be "at least 24 feet in width, with draw gates not less than 18 feet in width to allow the passage of vessels." The turnpike era lasted about 30 years. Largely because of high maintenance costs, few turnpikes showed a profit. At best, they paid small dividends, even in times of peak travel. Competition, first from canals and later from railroads, hastened their demise. They were eventually surrendered to the state and dedicated as public roads.

In their heyday, turnpikes presented scenes of lively activity: stagecoaches transporting travelers and mail; emigrants moving west with their household goods packed in covered wagons; wagoners driving six- and eight-horse teams hauling heavily laden freight wagons with broad-rimmed wheels; drovers herding cattle, sheep or pigs to markets; and Yankee peddlers with their light wagons filled with needles, buttons and thread to delight farm wives.

By the 1830's, stagecoach lines were carrying the mail over more than seventeen million miles of post roads annually. One could travel by stagecoach throughout most of the settled portions of the nation. One stipulation in every mail stage contract was that space for seven passengers must be provided.

No account of post roads would be complete without mention of the hectic state of early mail service. Unchanged since 1792, the original high letter postage rates persisted--even though the means of transport had improved and costs had been reduced. For example, it cost eighteen and one-half cents to send a letter from Manhattan to Troy, northeast of Albany--but twelve and one-half cents to ship a barrel of flour the same distance. Postage could be prepaid, as we do now, but was charged under a complicated system based on the number of sheets in a letter and the distance traveled. Mailing a letter became a slow and tedious process.

Letters were written on one or more sheets of paper, then folded and sealed, either with hot sealing wax or a paper wafer. The address was written on the outside. Envelopes would not be introduced from France until mid-century. Upon mailing, each letter was inspected for unlawful enclosures and to ascertain whether it had been carried part way by someone to defraud the Post Office. Evasion of postage was rife. The shameless bootlegging of letters extended through every stratum of society, business and the professions.

Postage also could be charged at the receiving end. Because prepaying a letter took so much time, most letter writers let the recipient pay the postage. This led to many abuses: when opened, some letters turned out to be of little interest or someone's idea of a prank. A romantic billet-doux containing a pressed violet was a "double letter," charged at twice the single rate. A single-sheet letter enclosing two small clippings was subject to triple postage.

The charge for mailing a letter only a short distance was a large part of a workingman's daily wages. Letters became a convenience only for the wealthy--and even they avoided paying postage whenever they could. Elaborate codes were developed to write messages on the outside of the folded sheets of paper, usually as variations in the return address. After deciphering the code, such letters would be refused by the recipient, thus avoiding postage charges.

Franks were another curse of the mail service. Members of Congress, postmasters and government officials were authorized to frank letters. Many of them were not above using a rubber stamp (or "facsimile," as it was called), bearing their signature. These were so frequently copied, lent, handed out to friends and constituents or even stolen that thousands of unauthorized persons were using them to frank their mail.

The Post Office Act of 1792 that set the postage rate on a one-page letter going 100 miles at twelve cents paradoxically allowed a bulky newspaper to go the same distance for one cent. And for one and a half cents a newspaper could be sent any distance, while the postage on a one-page letter going more than 450 miles was twenty-five cents. Not surprisingly, senders took advantage of the lower rates for mailing newspapers to convey messages secretly. One method was to mark selected words with underlining in pencil or with pinholes through them. Those who had devised no code system, or who had no access to franks, or who were too poor even to buy newspapers for marking with hidden messages, were literally cut off from correspondence.

To avoid paying exorbitant postage, friends going on a trip were often asked to carry and deliver letters and parcels. Some travelers even made illicit letter-carrying a regular business. Private express services sprang up to carry packages and mail and circumvent the Post Office. In fact, as many letters were being carried outside the system as in it.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the much-traveled and observant Frenchman who toured the United States in 1831, marveled at the law-abiding Americans. But the author of the perceptive study entitled Democracy in America would have been shocked to discover that a large segment of the population was breaking the postal laws with impunity.

Not until 1845 did this country take a cue from the British mail system and lower postal rates by eliminating the distance factor. Only then did a measure of sanity come to the American postal system. Adhesive stamps--in two values: Benjamin Franklin (five cents) and George Washington (ten cents)--were introduced in 1847. These rates were later reduced even further.

Meanwhile, a new competitor to post roads had appeared: steamboats, which carried letters for the first time in 1813. Ten years later, Congress declared the navigable rivers of the country to be post roads. Wherever steamboat and stagecoach routes paralleled one another along the coast or rivers, steamboats won mail contracts and passengers from the stage lines.

In 1838, although railroads were comparatively rare, Congress declared all railways to be post roads. The postmaster general was authorized to pay as much as 25 percent more for transportation of the mail by rail than was paid to stagecoach operators. It was the handwriting on the wall for Westchester's two main post roads and for Hudson River steamboats as prime carriers of passengers and mail.

With a ready supply of immigrant Irish track workers, the New York & New Haven Railroad soon surmounted the problem of bridging the many rivers that ran down to Long Island Sound. Beginning operations in 1848, it carried passengers and freight in competition with horse traffic on the Boston Post Road.

Laying its tracks along the easily accessible banks of the Hudson, the Hudson River Railroad reached Poughkeepsie in 1849 and Albany two years later. Thereafter, the Albany Post Road would carry only local traffic and the few stubborn die-hard passengers who feared that the boilers of the new-fangled locomotives would explode.

If post roads could talk, what stories they could tell! During the Revolution, peaceable Westchester, through which the Albany Post Road passed, was the "Neutral Ground," a hotly contested area between British forces at Kingsbridge and the Americans at the Croton River. Using post roads for lightning forays, raiding parties of both sides put life and property at risk for those who lived in between.

Major André, the courtly British spy later hanged at Old Tappan, N.Y., was making his way down the Albany Post Road to New York City when captured at Tarrytown. In his stockings he carried the plans of the fortifications at West Point obtained from an American traitor, none other than Gen. Benedict Arnold.

On this same post road the famous headless horseman was known to ride at night, according to Brom Bones. Along with Ichabod Crane, Bones was a suitor for the hand of Katrina Van Tassel. Near the bridge over Gory Brook in North Tarrytown, the mysterious rider threw his severed head at Crane, causing the poor schoolteacher to depart for parts unknown. We have Washington Irving's solemn word for this.

Many years later, early automobiles with now-forgotten names-- Allen-Kingston, Lozier, Stearns, Simplex--chugged up the Albany Post Road to Westchester from New York City on April 15, 1908, allowing quiet Briarcliff Manor saw the start and finish of an "international trophy road race." In this noisy contest, twenty-two cars careened wildly around a 32.4-mile circuit of unimproved back roads eight times. Among the drivers who later became famous were Barney Oldfield and Ralph De Palma. Piloting an Isotta, Louis Strang won the race at an average speed of 46 miles per hour.

Buried today under layers of macadam and concrete, traces of our original post roads have all but disappeared. Never formally designated as historic sites, they persist only as remnant names on road signs, their carefully chosen paths still marked by the few weathered milestones surviving the ravages of time. Nevertheless, those who live near these storied paths should listen very carefully in the small hours. They may hear the distant drumbeat of thundering hoofs, the sharp crack of a whip, the squeal of brake blocks against the rims of stagecoach wheels. They may even catch the sound of spectral voices echoing across the years from a past almost beyond recall.

Labels: History, Mail, Post Roads

Posted by Notorc @ 10/05/2006 07:00:00 AM