The Post Road
The President of the United States probably set off on his first official tour from his official residence at 3 Cherry St., near the Battery, at dawn of a rainy, miserable Thursday morning, Oct. 15, 1789. According to his diary, President Washington departed New York with a party consisting of "Major Jackson, Mr. Lear, and myself with six servants, which composed my Retinue."
As the President's coaches rolled north along Broadway, they passed the old City Hall at Nassau and Wall Sts. There they entered the Post Road, which they would follow all the way to Boston. Within a few minutes, they rolled into what is now Park Row, past the Debtor's Jail at the northeast corner of today's City Hall Park. They passed John Fowler's Tavern, "near the Collect Pond at the edge of the city," which served as an unofficial terminus for the stagecoach lines to the north. Then they began passing the Post Road's milestones, whose locations help map the meandering way of the road in Manhattan. Milestone #1 was on the Bowery, a little south of Canal St. Milestone #2 was at the southwest corner of Astor Pl. and 4th Ave.
Milestone #3 was at Madison Ave. and E. 26th St. Milestone #4 was on the east side of 3rd Ave., midway between 45th and 46th Sts. Milestone #5 was on the west side of 2nd Ave., at 62nd St. From there, the road wound northwesterly to 5th Ave. and 98th St., whence it became what is now the East Drive of Central Park.
The coaches passed taverns and scattered country estates, through McGown's Pass around 103rd St. and the village of Harlem, and along what are now St. Nicholas Ave. and Broadway. Much later, just before reaching Marble Hill and the King's Bridge across Spuyten Duyvil Creek, they would have observed the 14th milestone, the last one in Manhattan. Today, it would be located somewhere off the west side of the bridge carrying Broadway over the Harlem Ship Canal, dredged in the 19th century.
Washington dined at Kingsbridge, "in a tavern kept by one Hoyatt," and spent the night at Rye in the tavern kept by the Widow Haviland, whose husband had been killed while serving in the Revolutionary army. The President noted that she kept "a very neat and decent inn." After touring Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire (Maine was then part of Massachusetts, Rhode Island had not yet ratified the Constitution and Vermont was an independent republic), he returned via the Post Road to New York. He stayed again at the Widow Haviland's during his last night on the road, Nov. 11, 1789, and returned to New York on the following day, "where I found Mrs. Washington and the rest of the family all well."
The Post Road in Manhattan has nearly vanished. Its fragments survive under other names. However, much of it survives up in the Bronx, where it divided into the Albany, Boston and White Plains Post Roads. The Albany Post Road. is now Rte. 9, running up the Hudson to Albany and beyond to Canada. The Boston Post Road, now Boston Rd., is one of the busiest roads in the Bronx, passing northeasterly from 3rd Ave. and E. 163rd St. through Baychester, Olinville, Laconia and Williamsbridge to the Westchester County line. And the old White Plains Post Road, marked on early maps as the "road to Bedford and Vermont," has become White Plains Rd.
The Post Roads are older than America herself. They were Indian trails long before European settlers came, and even their names commemorate an older way of life. In my childhood, most people wrote letters; long-distance telephone calls were rare (and expensive) events. Now, written communications travel around the world as e-mail with the click of a mouse.
Mail, which comes from the Middle English, is derived from a Germanic word meaning "bag." The word eventually referred first to the particular kind of satchel used for letters and packets, and then to the bag's contents. Post came from the Latin postum, meaning "stopping place." It referred to the point at which one dispatch rider or runner relayed his bag of messages to another. Until the mid-19th century, the relay system devised by the Romans remained the primary means of transmitting personal messages, packages and news in general.
When the British seized New Amsterdam in 1664, they brought their postal system. Like most state posts, the post office initially existed to transport just government communications and opened to the public only in 1635. In 1672, King Charles II of England ordered Gov. Francis Lovelace of New York and Gov. John Winthrop of Connecticut to "enter into a close correspondency with each other." They quickly agreed to hire "a stout fellow, active and indefatigable, and sworne as to his fidelity" who should charge postage for private letters and "other small portable packes." They also agreed to determine a fixed route for the riders, with river crossings and accommodations for the night, and establish stages, or relays, where a post rider would find a fresh horse waiting.
He would leave New York on the first Monday of the month and "return within the month from Boston." Nonetheless, according to Stewart Holbrook, the preeminent biographer of the Post Road, the first overland mail in North America did not leave New York until Jan. 22, 1673 (the Albany dispatches arrived three weeks late), arriving in Boston on or about Feb. 5, 1673. The first post rider's task was daunting. Once outside the city (which did not run much beyond Wall St.) and the suburbs (which did not run much above the Bowery), he rode alone in the dead of winter along an Indian trail through an otherwise "trackless wilderness as dangerous...as anything in North America." The trail was often faint; indeed, he and his immediate successors carried axes to blaze the trees so future riders might know the way.
The mails were soon disrupted. First?briefly?the Dutch reoccupied New York in 1673 (Lovelace was out of town on business when they landed; the King dismissed him upon learning of the city's surrender). Then, King Philip, a tough, aggressive Indian chieftain, rose against the English in 1675. He took and pillaged Swansea, Brookfield and Lancaster, MA, all on or near the Post Road. King Philip's War was not suppressed until 1678.
The post remained in abeyance until New York had its first great governor, Thomas Dongan. An Irish Catholic soldier, Dongan was a practical friend of liberty. He granted New Yorkers local self-government by erecting New York, Kings, Queens and Richmond Counties; he recognized human rights in the Charter of Liberties and Privileges; he also revived the post. Less liberally, he fixed postage at three pence for distances not exceeding 100 miles: roughly $3 in today's money.
The postal system was privatized in 1691. The exclusive right to operate the post office was granted to one Thomas Neale of Philadelphia. Then, as now, customers thought the rates were excessive for the service provided and the system of delivery inefficient. Nonetheless, the mails bumbled on. The Indian trails became paths and then wagon roads, and the Post Road became the major overland route between New England and New York.
The old postal system was discarded in 1751, when the Crown appointed the first great American postmaster general. Dr. Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia was one of two "Joint Deputy Postmasters and Managers of his Majesty's Provinces and Dominions on the Continent of North America." Responsible for the northern colonies, with his office at Philadelphia, Franklin would split an annual salary of £600 sterling with his southern counterpart, assuming there was money left over after paying the operating expenses.
Franklin had a healthy respect for cash flow. The practical issue before him was maximizing revenue. Postage was then calculated by the distance a letter was carried. Everyone disagreed about the distances between various points. Franklin, being Franklin, invented or adapted (the truth is unclear) an odometer to measure distances. He installed it in a carriage "of his own design" and, in 1753, he traveled the length of the Post Roads in it over some 10 weeks. Behind his carriage followed men with carts loaded with milestones. As the odometer measured out each mile, the men dug a hole and erected a milestone. Into its face they carved the distance from New York.
Service increased with a mail wagon running weekly between Philadelphia and Boston. His express riders galloped by night and day, using lanterns to light their way. These changes cut delivery time in half. He also devised a transparent bookkeeping system to control costs. In 1761, Franklin remitted to London the first money ever earned by an American post office.
For most New Yorkers, however, the milestones seemed more important than the mails. They were cited in deeds and wedding announcements, and helped clarify the addresses of businesses and homes. They were popular locations for taverns. In marking the road, Franklin's milestones became more than mere markers. Richard Koke, longtime curator of the New-York Historical Society, once suggested they had even transformed the meaning of the word milestone itself into a metaphor for human progress.
The Post Roads, like the post office, were about communication as much as the physical delivery of mail. This lies at the roots of democracy: we cannot have reasoned debate without information. Thus, mistrusting the royal mails, Paul Revere galloped down the Post Road from Boston to Philadelphia in 1774, carrying the Suffolk Resolves?"the most inflammatory document before the Declaration of Independence" (Holbrook again)?to the Continental Congress. A year or so later, Ebenezer Hurd thundered into Manhattan, bringing the first news of the fighting at Lexington and Concord.
As the city grew in the 19th century, Manhattan's Post Road began disappearing. This was a matter of land use. The island's grid system of streets, first mapped by Joseph Randal before the War of 1812, constituted the official city map. The meandering (but real) Post Road conflicted with the rigid grid (which at first was something of a legal fiction). Post riders began finding new foundations being dug in the middle of the road. Eventually, the Post Road conformed to the grid in some places and was simply overbuilt in others. The railroads took over the mails during the mid-19th century and roads in general lost their importance for another 75 years, until the advent of the automobile.
Some 40 years ago, Koke wrote he had last seen the ninth milestone in 1950. Then it stood in a private garden at 473 W. 152nd St., having migrated from its original location. He could still read the legend: