British hoped road to victory would go through Vt.
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This map shows the historic Crown Point Road superimposed over the current road system. IMAGE: MAP ADVENTURES, COURTESY OF CPRA |
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By MARK BUSHNELL - Published: June 28, 2009
PROCTOR - We are getting close, my guides tell me. Having doused ourselves in bug spray before entering the thicket, we are bushwhacking our way along a hillside, nearing the place where a quarter millennium ago a British general laid down his sword.
But it's not a sword we are after today; it's a road.
Legend has it that 250 years ago, after capturing the French Fort St. Frederic on the New York shore of Lake Champlain, Gen. Jeffrey Amherst unsheathed his sword and laid it across a map to show where he wanted to build a road through the wilderness to help bring supplies to the troops. It would be known as the Crown Point Road.
That's the road we are after today. My guides are Jim Rowe and Jim Moore, active members of the Crown Point Road Association. For the last 50 years, the group has been working to locate, mark, protect and publicize this relic of the French and Indian War. The association's 250 member households are spread among the communities through which the road runs.
Getting back to the sword, I should note that a less heroic version of the story has it that it was a ruler that Amherst laid across the map that day. Or perhaps he just gestured with his finger.
After that moment, Amherst didn't lift another finger actually building the road. He left that to the hundreds of soldiers who would do the arduous work of cutting trees, laying down corduroy roadbed and building stone retaining walls to keep it from washing out.
This route would connect Fort St. Frederic (renamed the Fort of Crown Point or, more simply, Crown Point) with Fort No. 4 in Charlestown, N.H., about 77 miles to the southeast. Since Fort No. 4 had, by 18th century standards, easy access to the coast, the new road would become part of a vital route bringing supplies north, as the British pursued their plan to clear the French out of North America. The British would ultimately attain that goal militarily, though you'll notice that today much of Canada remains French, at least linguistically and culturally.
In August 1759, while war still raged, Amherst ordered Capt. John Stark of New Hampshire, who would gain fame 18 years later leading American forces at the Battle of Bennington, to rough out the route. Amherst's orders called for the road to be at least 20 feet wide, with bridges crossing wet areas. The road had to be able to withstand the passage of heavily laden wagons and herds of oxen.
In a month, Stark and about 200 men hacked their way through the wilderness all the way from Bridport through Springfield to Fort No. 4 and back. Where they could, they followed centuries-old paths used by American Indians. They cut trees to clear the way and laid them across marshy spots. What they left behind them couldn't have resembled much more than a partially cleared trail - they covered an average of five miles a day - but it was a start.
In late October, a detachment of 250 men set off from Crown Point. Over the next three weeks, they would improve the route, clearing more trees and building primitive bridges, and nearly starving. "One biscuit for one man ..." wrote one of the soldiers, Robert Webster. That was an improvement over two days earlier, when it was "one biscuit for four men." "We have nice weather and hungry bellies."
A New Hampshire regiment of 800 men would finish the job the following year.
Finding the road today is harder than it might sound. Two hundred and fifty years is a long time, but it's still astounding how completely nature can hide traces of the past. After a couple more assurances that we are nearing our goal (my guides seem to worry that I'll think they are taking me on a wild goose chase), we come to a rivulet through the woods. It's a sign we are almost there.
"When you want to figure out where someone lived, you look for their water supply," explains Moore as we step over the stream. Just uphill from it, we come to an old cellar hole, which is all that remains of a cabin built by settler Roger Stevens and his family.
"This was a good-sized home," says Moore, who estimates it was 35 feet by 20 feet. All that's left is a perimeter of stacked mossy stones. But whenever you see stone piled on stone in the woods, you might be onto something, the men tell me.
Settlers like Stevens built homesteads along the Crown Point Road shortly after the French and Indian War. So though it was started as a military highway, the Crown Point Road had the side effect of encouraging settlement.
Incidentally, Stevens and family didn't stay long. Judging by their home's foundation, they were in it for the long haul. But events got in the way. When the American Revolution broke out, they backed the British, which didn't prove to be a good decision. The family soon moved in search of a more welcoming community. If their politics had been different, Moore points out, instead of being a mere cellar hole, their home might have had a satellite dish on it today.
But even abandoned homes provide important clues to the road's path.
"We have to do a lot of extrapolating between known points," says Moore, like the Stevens homestead. Walking along the road, you can see that sometimes the route is obvious, as when it clearly crosses a low ridge between cellar holes. Stark, and the road builders who followed, obviously took the easiest route, instead of running it over the steepest sections. But other times it is possible to lose the track entirely.
Though the road's entire original course remains a mystery, the Crown Point Road Association knows the general route. And later this summer, it is organizing an end-to-end hike to mark the road's 250th anniversary. The hike will begin Aug. 9, during a French and Indian War encampment weekend at Crown Point in New York.
After a couple of hours walking on, and perhaps off, this ghost-like road, I realize that to understand the Crown Point Road, I'll have to throw out my conception of what a road is.
As the late Albert Ransom, a venerated group member, once wrote, "The Crown Point Road was not a static, fixed-in-one-place road, but more like the creek, which it often followed, was constantly changing and evolving into a new road, with new parts being added and some old parts being abandoned as better routes were discovered."
The impermanence of this road is tantalizing. Its illusiveness, I suspect, is part of what keeps the group's members interested.
Jim Rowe worked for years on the family dairy farm in Orwell, not far from the Crown Point Road. Though another job took him out of the area, he's still active in the group - he's its current president.
Now that he has spent so long looking for the Crown Point Road, Rowe can see clues to the road's location that others might miss.
"In the spring," he says, "when I'm driving along and come to a field that's just been cut, and the light hits it just right, I can see where the road was."
Mark Bushnell's column on Vermont history is a weekly feature in Vermont Sunday Magazine. He can be reached at vermontpastlane@gmail.com.