Stage-coach and Tavern Days

The traveller by the coach learned constant lessons from that great teacher, Nature. Even if he were city bred he grew to know, as he saw them, the various duties of country life, the round of work on the farm, the succession of crops, the names of grains, and he knew each grain and grass when he saw it, which few of city life do now. He saw the timid flight of wild creatures, rabbits, woodchucks, squirrels, sometimes a wily fox. My father once, riding on a stage-coach in Vermont, chased down a mountain road a young deer that ran, bewildered, before its terrible pursuer. At night the traveller heard strange sounds, owls and a smothered snarl as the coach entered the woods – a catamount perhaps. He heard the singing birds of spring and noted the game-birds of autumn; and in winter they could watch the broad and beautiful flight of the crows, free in snowy woods and fields from the rivalry of all fellow feathered creatures. He saw the procession of wild flowers, though he, perhaps, did not consciously heed them, and he knew the trees by name. The stage-driver showed his passengers “the biggest ellum in the county,” and “the best grove of sugar-maples in the state.” He pointed out a lovely vista of white birches as “the purtiest grove o’ birch on the road,” and there was a dense grove of mulberry trees, the sole survivors of silk-worm culture in which were buried so many hours and years of hard labor, so much hard-earned capital, so many feverish hopes. And towering a giant among lesser brothers, a glorious pine tree still showing the mark of the broad arrow of the King, chosen to be a mast for his great ships, but living long after he was dead and his ships were sunken and rotten, living to be a king itself in a republican land.

The foot-farer, trudging along the outskirts of the village, is often shut out by close stone or board barriers from any sight of the flowering country gardens, the luxuriance of whose blossoming is promised by the heads of the tall hollyhocks that bend over and nod pleasantly to him; but the traveller on the coach could see into these old gardens, could feast his eyes on all the glorious tangle of larkspur and phlox, of tiger lilies and candytuft, of snowballs and lilacs, of marigolds and asters, each season outdoing the other in brilliant bloom.

And what odors were wafted out from those gardens! What sweetness came from the lilacs and deutzias and syringas; from clove-pinks and spice bush and honeysuckles; how weird was the anise-like scent of the fraxinella or dittany; and how often all were stifled by the box, breathing, says Holmes, the fragrance of eternity! The great botanist Linnæus grouped the odors of plants and flowers into classes, of which three were pleasing perfumes. To these he gave the titles the aromatic, the fragrant, the ambrosial – our stage-coach traveller had them all three.

From the fields came the scent of flowering buckwheat and mellifluous clover, and later of new-mown hay, sometimes varied by the tonic breath of the salt hay on the sea marshes. The orchards wafted the perfumes from apple blossoms, and from the pure blooms of cherry and plum and pear; in the woods the beautiful wild cherries equalled their domestic sisters.

How sweet, how healthful, were the cool depths of the pine woods, how clean the hemlock, spruce, fir, pine, and juniper, and how sweet and balsamic their united perfume. And from the woods and roadsides such varied sweetness! The faint hint of perfume from the hidden arbutus in early spring, and the violet; the azalea truly ambrosial with its pure honey-smell; the intense cloying clethra with the strange odor of its bruised foliage; the meadowsweet; the strong perfume of the barberry; and freshest, purest, best of all, the bayberry throwing off balm from every leaf and berry. Even in the late autumn the scent of the dying brakes and ferns were as beloved by the country-lover as the fresh smell of the upturned earth in the spring after the farmer’s plough, or the scent of burning brush.

Fruit odors came too to the happy traveller, the faint scent of strawberries, the wild strawberry the most spicy of all, and later of the dying strawberry leaves; even the strong and pungent onions are far from offensive in the open air; while the rich fruity smell of great heaps of ripe apples in the orchards is carried farther by the acid vapors from the cider mills, which tempt the driver to stop and let all taste new apple-juice.

In the days of the stage-coach we had on our summer journeys all these delights, the scents of the wood, the field, the garden; we had the genial sunlight, the fresh air of mountain, plain, and sea; and all the wild and beautiful sights which made the proper time for travel – the summer – truly joyful. Now we may enjoy a place when we get there, but we have a poor substitute for the coach for the actual travelling – a dirty railway car heated almost to tinder by the sun, with close foul air (and the better the car the fouler and closer the air) filled, if we try to have fresh air, with black smoke and cinders; clattering and noisy ever, with occasional louder-shrieking whistles and bells, and sometimes a horrible tunnel – it has but one redeeming quality, its speed, for thereby the journey is shortened.

Cheerful friends on the old roads were the milestones and guideposts. Milestones had an assured position in social life, a dignified standing. It would be told of a road as a great honor and distinction, and told fitly in capitalized sentences thus, “This Elegant road is fully Set with well-cut Milestones.” A few of the old provincial milestones remain, and put us closely in touch with the past. In Governor Hutchinson’s day milestones were set on all the post-roads throughout Massachusetts. Several of these are still standing; one is in Worcester, in the heart of the city, marked “42 Mls. to Boston, 50 Mls. to Springfield, 1771.” Another is in Sutton. It is five feet high and nearly three feet wide. It is marked “48 mls. to Boston. B. W.” The letters B. W. stand for Bartholomew Woodbury, a genial tavern-keeper of Sutton. It shows a custom which obtained at that date. It was deemed most advantageous to a tavern to have a milestone in front of it. Possibly the tale of the stone shown in its lettering urged wayworn travellers to halt and rest within the welcoming door. Bartholomew Woodbury’s Tavern was a few rods from the spot marked for the stone, but the government permitted him to set this stone by his doorside, at his own expense, beside the great horse-block. Tavern-keeper and tavern are gone, and the old road sees few travellers. Occasionally some passer-by, inquisitive like myself of the presence of the old stone, will halt as did the traveller of old, and pull away the curtain of vines, and read the lettering of this gravestone of the old Woodbury Tavern.

Another landlord who appreciated that the milestone served as a magnet to draw customers to the tavern taproom was Landlord Taylor, who kept the old tavern known as “Taylor’s,” in Danbury, Connecticut. The house with the milestone is shown on page 350 and the milestone alone on page 351.

Judge Peleg Arnold was one of the most active patriots in northern Rhode Island during the Revolution; for many years he carried on a tavern at Union Village, a suburb of Woonsocket, and his house was noted for its excellence and hospitality. Not far from his tavern to the northward the “Great Road” from Smithfield into Mendon wound through woods and meadows and over the northern hills of Rhode Island.

In 1666 this great road was a small foot-path through the woods, and was indicated by marked trees leading from cabin to cabin; but in 1733 it had taken upon itself the dignity of a cart-path and then became the subject of discussions on town-meeting days. Peleg Arnold had been one of the men to re-lay the old road, and it was near the northern boundary of his farm that he set up the old milestone shown here. For more than a hundred and twenty-five years this stone has served to brighten the hearts of travellers, for they have learned to know that this silent and inanimate guide can be relied upon as to distances with much more certainty than can the words of residents in the neighborhood.

When Benjamin Franklin was Postmaster-general, he set an indelible postmark in many ways on the history of our country; and many mementos of him still exist. Among them are the old milestones set under his supervision. He transacted this apparently prosaic business with that picturesque originality which he brought to all his doings and which renders to every detail of his life an interest which cannot be exceeded and scarcely equalled by the events recorded of any other figure in history.

He drove over the roads which were to be marked by milestones, seated in a comfortable chaise, of his own planning, and followed by a gang of men, and heavy carts laden with the milestones. Attached to the chaise was a machine of his invention which registered by the revolution of the wheels the number of miles the chaise passed over. At each mile he halted, and a stone was dropped which was afterward set. The King’s Highway, the old Pequot Trail, was thus marked and set. A few of these milestones between Boston and Philadelphia are still standing, one in New London, another at Stratford, and are glanced at carelessly by the hundreds of thousands who glide swiftly past on wheels bearing more accurate cyclometers than that of Franklin.

Guide-boards always stood at the crossings of all travelled roads; indeed, they stood where the roads were scarce more than lines among the grass and low shrubs. Since our day of many railroads, and above all, since the interlacing network of trolley lines has spread over all our Eastern lands where once the stage-coach ran, many guide-boards have disappeared and have not been replaced. You find them often at the angles of the road lying flat in grass and bushes; or standing split, one-sided, askew, pointing the road to the skies, or nowhere. When in trim and good repair in the days of their utility and helpfulness, they were friendly things, and the pointing hand gave them a half-human semblance of cheerful aid. Where the road led through woods or rarely frequented ways, they were friends indeed, for all ways looked alike, and one might readily go far astray. The mile of the guide-board was an elastic one, and sometimes a weary one.

Guide-boards, even poor ones, are still most welcome. No one in the country ever has any correct estimate of distances; a distance “a little better than three miles” before you usually increases by an extraordinary law instead of decreases after you have driven nearly a mile to “about four mile.” The next road-jogger says “nigh on to a mile”; and then you may be sure a few hundred feet farther on to jump back to a slow and wise rejoinder of the original distance, “hard on to four mile.”

Another wayside friend of the traveller in coaching days was the watering trough. It was frequently a log of wood hollowed out, Indian fashion, like a dug-out, filled with the lavish bounty of untrammelled Nature by a cool pure rill from a hillside spring. One of these watering troughs is shown on this page. In the days of the glory of the stage-coach and turnpike, fine stone troughs chiselled like an Egyptian sarcophagus took the place of the log dug-out. They had their supply from a handled pump, which was a more prosaic vehicle than the pipe made of hollowed tree-trunks which brought the spring-water; but it had also a certain interest as the water spouted out in response to the vigorous pumping, and it has been immortalized by Hawthorne. Our artesian wells, and sunken pipes, and vast reservoir systems are infinitely better than the old-time modes of water supply, but we miss the pleasure that came from the sight of the water, whether it was borne to us on the picturesque well-sweep by wheel and bucket, or old chain pump; it was good to look at as well as to taste, and it refreshed man even to see cattle and horses drinking from the primitive trough.

There is always something picturesque and pleasant in an old bridge, and of historic associations as well. The great logs such as form a wooden bridge over a narrow stream are the most natural waterspans, those of the primitive savages. By fallen tree-trunks placed or utilized by the Indians, the colonists first crossed the inland streams, adding parallel trunks as years passed on and helping hands multiplied; and finally placing heavy, flat cross-timbers and boards when hand-saws and sawmills shaped the forests’ wealth for domestic use.

The old arched stone bridges are ever a delight to the eye and the thoughtful mind. Look at the picture of the old Topsfield Bridge shown on the opposite page. It was built in 1760 over the Ipswich River. It shows the semicircle – simplest of all arched forms – which is happily within the compass and ever the selection of rustic builders. The shallow voussoirs speak of security and economy rather than of monumental effect; the irregular shape and size of the stones tell a similar tale, that there was ample and fitting material near by, in every field. The arched stone bridge is a primitive structure; the sort of construction that may be found in the so-called “Cyclopean” walls of earliest Greece; and this very simplicity is a distinct beauty, that, added to its fitness and durability, makes the bridge a thing of satisfaction.

How charming are the reflections in the stilly waters, the arch making the perfect circle, ever an attractive and symbolic form. How cool and beautiful is the shadowy water under these stone arches; but it cannot be reached by the rider in stage-coach or on horseback, as can the brook spanned by a wooden bridge. This has often a watering place which spreads out on one side of the road, a shoal pool of clear, crystal, dancing water. The bottom is cut with the ruts of travellers’ wheels, but the water is pure and glistening; the pool is edged heavily with mint and thoroughwort and a tangle of greenery pierced with a few glorious scarlet spires of cardinal flowers, and some duller blooms. How boys love to wade in these pools, and dogs to swim in them, and horses to drink from them. The wooden bridge seems in midsummer a useless structure, fit only to serve as a trellis for clematis and sweet brier and many running vines, and to be screened with azalea, clethra, and elder, and scores of sweet-flowered shrubs that add their scent to the strong odor of mint that fills the air, as the sensitive leaves are bruised by careless contact.

There was a closeness of association in stage-coach travel which made fellow-passengers companionable. One would feel a decided intimacy with a fellow-sufferer who had risen several mornings in succession with you, at daybreak, and ridden all night, cheek by jowl. Even fellow-travellers on short trips entered into conversation, and the characteristic inquisitiveness was shown. Ralph Waldo Emerson took great delight in this experience of his in stage-coach travel. A sharp-featured, keen-eyed, elderly Yankee woman rode in a Vermont coach opposite a woman deeply veiled and garbed in mourning attire, and the older woman thus entered into conversation: “Have you lost friends?” “Yes,” was the answer, “I have.” “Was they near friends?” “Yes, they was.” “How near was they?” “A husband and a brother.” “Where did they die?” “Down in Mobile.” “What did they die of?” “Yellow fever.” “How long was they sick?” “Not very long.” “Was they seafaring men?” “Yes, they was.” “Did you save their chists?” “Yes, I did.” “Was they hopefully pious?” “I hope so.” “Well, if you have got their chists (with emphasis) and they was hopefully pious, you’ve got much to be thankful for.” Perhaps this conversation should be recorded in the succeeding chapter, but in truth the pleasures and pains of stage-coach travel ran so closely side by side that they can scarce be separated. Many pleasant intimacies and acquaintances were begun on the stage-coach; flirtations, even courtships, were carried on. One gentleman remembers that when he was a big schoolboy he rode on the coach from Pittsfield, New Hampshire, to Dover, and he cast sheep’s-eyes at a pretty young woman who was a fellow-passenger. He had just gathered courage to address her with some bold, manly remark when the coach stopped and a middle-aged man of importance entered. Soon all other passengers got out and the three were left in the coach; and the Boy heard the Man recall himself to the Girl as having been her teacher when she was a child. He soon proceeded to make love to her, and made her a proposal of marriage, which she did not refuse, but asked a week’s time to consider. “And during all this courting,” said my informant, with indignant reminiscence after fifty years, “they paid no more attention to my presence than if I had been Pickwick’s Fat Boy.”

The pleasures of coaching days have been written by many an English author in forcible and beautiful language. Thomas De Quincey sang in most glowing speech the glories of the English mail-coach. He says: —

“Modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, not, however, as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence; as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from feeling it as a personal experience; or upon the evidence of a result, as that we actually find ourselves in York four hours after leaving London. Apart from such an assertion, or such a result, I myself am little aware of the pace. But seated on the old mail-coach we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity… The vital experiences of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed. We heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it a-thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate energies that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest among brutes, in his dilated nostril, his spasmodic muscles and thunder-beating hoofs.”

Nothing more magnificent and inspiring could be written than his Going Down with Victory– the carrying the news of the victory at Waterloo on the mail-coach to English hamlets and towns; it is a gem of English literature.

CHAPTER XVII

THE PAINS OF STAGE-COACH TRAVEL

In describing the pleasures and pains, the delights and dangers, the virtues and vicissitudes of the travel of early days by stage-coach in America, I have chosen to employ largely the words and descriptions of contemporary travellers rather than any wording of my own, not only because any such description of mine would be simply a transcription of their facts, but because there is a sense of closeness of touch, a pleasant intimacy, and indeed a profound sympathy thereby established with those old travellers and modes of travel which cannot be obtained by modern wording; nor indeed can their descriptions and travellers’ tales be improved. Careless or ignorant writers often portray early stage-coach travel in America in the same terms as would be used of similar travel in England, and as having the same accessories; it was in truth very different in nearly all of its conditions, as different as were the vehicles used in America.

I do not believe that travellers in coaching days found much pleasure in long journeys by stage-coach. They doubtless enjoyed short trips, or possibly a day on a coach, as we do now, but serious travel was serious indeed. In winter it must have appeared a slow form of lingering death.

Grant Thorburn, the New York seedsman, tells of the first journey he ever made by land. It was in the winter of 1831; he was then fifty-eight years old.

“We left Hoboken with about fifteen passengers closely packed in a stage with wheels, and a very neat coach, and so foolish was I and ignorant (never having travelled on land) I thought this same fine close carriage would go through thick and thin with me all the way to Albany: in two short hours my eyes were opened. We stopped in Hackensack at a tavern grocery grogshop and post-office all under one roof, for we carried Uncle Sam’s letter bags, which was another grievance, as we had to stop every few miles to change the mails. The keeper of the office began to bluster and swear he had neither carriages covered or uncovered to forward so many passengers. He said the Jockey Club in New York took all the money and gave him all the trouble. In short, says he, unless you remain here till four o’clock P.M. you must go on with such conveyance as I can furnish. We applied to our Hoboken driver. He said his orders were to drop us at Hackensack and bring back the coaches; and sure enough he turned about and back he went. I stepped into the barroom – a large place. In the centre stood a large old-fashioned tin-plate stove, surrounded by fifteen or twenty large lazy fellows. After waiting an hour we were sent forward, viz. two in an open chair, four in an open wagon, and the remainder, eight I think, in a common Jersey farming wagon, all the machines being without covers. It now commenced raining, and by the time we got to the next stage, we looked like moving pillars of salt, our hats and coats being covered to the thickness of an eighth of an inch with ice transparents. At the town of Goshen we changed the mail, thawed our garments, and ate our dinner. As we got north the sleighing got better, so we were accommodated with a covered box and runners, but alas! it was like the man’s lantern without a candle. The cover was of white wood boards placed a quarter of an inch apart without paint, leather, or canvas to protect them from the weather.

“We travelled all night. The rain and snow descending through the roof, our hats were frozen to our capes, and our cloaks to one another. In the morning we looked like some mountain of ice moving down the Gulf Stream. I thought the machine used at the Dry Dock would have been an excellent appendage to have lifted us bodily into the breakfast room: and this is what the horse-flesh fraternity in New York advertise as their safe, cheap, comfortable, and expeditious winter establishment for Albany.”

Dalton Winter Stage

This latter account is certainly a hard blow to the lover of the “good old times.” Of tough fibre and of vast powers of endurance, both mental and physical, must have been our grandfathers who dared to travel overland in winter time. Coaches were often “snowed up” and had to be deserted by the passengers, who were rescued in old pods and pungs, such as are shown on page 318, and the journey had to be continued in some of the awkward coach-bodies or “boobies” set on runners like those on pages 362 and 364. Coaches were also overturned or blown off bridges by heavy winds.

Somewhat varied was Captain Hall’s experience on the trip from Fredericksburg to Richmond during the following January. The stage-coach was appointed to start at 2 A.M., but at the blank looks of the captain, the stage agent said, “Well, if it is so disagreeable to the ladies, suppose we make it five?” The fare was five dollars. It took seventeen hours to travel the sixty-six miles, and the coach stopped at ten taverns on the way. At each his fellow-passengers all got out and took a mint julep; perhaps he did likewise, which might account for the fact that he pronounced the trip a pleasant one, though it rained; “your feet get wet; your clothes become plastered with mud from the wheel; the trunks drink in half a gallon of water apiece; the gentlemen’s boots and coats steamed in the confined air; the horses are draggled and chafed by the traces; the driver got his neckcloth saturated” – and yet, he adds, “the journey was performed pleasantly.”

There were days in July, in midsummer, when in spite of the beauties of Nature, the journey by stage-coach on the unwatered roads was not a thing of pleasure. Whether on “inside” or “outside,” the traveller could not escape the dust, nor could he escape the fervor of the July sun. And when the eye turned for relief to green pastures and roadsides, there was reflected back to him the heated gold of the sunlight, for the fields flamed with yellow and orange color. Sometimes accidents occurred. One may be described, using the contemporary account of it to show what danger was incurred and through what motive powers. In January, 1823, there was a sharp competition between the two stage lines running between Albany and New York, and apparently the stage-drivers on the rival lines could no more be kept from racing than the old-time steamboat captain. The accident was thus told in a newspaper of the day: —