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  • The King’s Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route that Made America
  • Michael R. Fein (bio)
The King’s Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route that Made America. By Eric Jaffe. New York: Scribner, 2010. Pp. ix+322. $27.50.

There is much to admire in The King’s Best Highway, Eric Jaffe’s “lost history” of the Boston Post Road (BPR). In brisk style, Jaffe whisks the reader in a tour of the signal events that have unfolded along this old route ever since the age of early British settlement. He has a strong feel for gripping anecdotes and the rich characters—ranging from John Winthrop Jr. to P. T. Barnum—whose lives intersect the road in intriguing ways. While the tales [End Page 484] are captivating, they never make clear precisely what about the road was “lost” to history, and what has now been found.

Targeting “American history buffs,” Jaffe covers much familiar ground, although with concentrated attention to the peculiar twists and turns of the Boston-to-New York route. The notes section suggests a detailed examination of original correspondence and archival research, and the text provides a valuable account of historical actors, both well- and lesser-known. Benjamin Franklin and George Washington travel the road, as postmaster and Revolutionary War general, respectively. But we also meet John Oldham, one of the first Plymouth settlers to survey what became the “Ordinary Way” in the 1630s; William Goddard, a Providence printer who defied the Stamp Act in the 1770s; Albert Pope, who popularized bicycling in the 1880s; and Lester Barlow, who lobbied for federally funded expressways in the 1920s.

The book is at its best when it explores the people who continually reinvented the road, or found in it a different meaning than their forebears. The route has changed little over the centuries: indeed, Jaffe notes that the Boston-to-Springfield route of the 1770s is only a scant four miles longer than today’s Interstate 90. But the stone and asphalt of the BPR turn out to be far more mercurial substances in Jaffe’s hands. To the Wickquasgecks, the path was a trade route, facilitating exchange with neighboring tribes and the Dutch inhabitants of Manhattan. To settlers in Oldham’s day, the “ordinary way” not only opened up inland colonial travel, it also conferred a sense of permanence to the towns that sprang up along its course. To Goddard and other publishers, the BPR was a “loop of information” that soon became a medium for revolution (p. 38). To Washington, the “King’s Best Highway” was a conduit for revolutionary arms and armies. After the war, the BPR became a sign of national betterment, first as an improved route, then as the site of parallel railroad and streetcar lines. To Pope, Bar-low, and other moderns, the road became synonymous with mobility, speed, and freedom. As the road moved on to “semiretirement” in the fast-paced interstate era, its stop-and-go traffic has left it in an “identity crisis”: torn between nostalgia for the route’s historic past and the bland repetition of endless Dunkin’ Donuts storefronts (pp. 239, 244).

Given the shape-shifting nature of the road, it is no surprise that Jaffe leaves several avenues underexplored. In part this reflects his choice of an episodic approach over one that directly engages intersecting historiography. It also reflects the challenges of portraying the road itself as a driving force. For instance, Jaffe claims that the route had a critical impact on colonial cohesiveness. But on the eve of revolution, at a time when other elements of colonial culture were becoming more distinctly British, was the King’s Best Highway an agent of Anglicization or Americanization? Jaffe also assigns the colonial-era BPR a place of prime importance in the nascent [End Page 485] American postal system. But did its presence alone spark a communication revolution, or did it require the political and administrative system put in place by Franklin and others after the Revolution? And much later, when the BPR (relocated as part of U.S. Route 1) gained fame as...

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