We’ve been on holiday in New England, enjoying the fall foliage.  I kept an eye open for things relevant to this blog, and sure enough, one arrived in upstate Vermont.

One of my main interests is in how roads have developed over time, how some main roads have become by-ways, or how roadside buildings can suggest to us what travellers of previous centuries experienced.  In Vermont, we visited a museum known as the Old Stone House in a place called Brownington, where the staff explained that what’s now a small and quiet village had been very busy in the 19th century, as it was on the main coaching road from Montreal to Boston, both fast-growing cities and emerging commercial centres.  The winter stage coach service began in 1824.

The road now is a minor road, and as it heads north from Brownington isn’t metalled: it’s a dirt track, albeit wide and pretty firm – we chose not to drive our hire car along it, but would have risked our own car in most weathers.  The pick-up trucks on the road today threw up clouds of dust – an apt reconstruction of one of the things which coach drivers and outside passengers would have had to deal with in the mid 1800s, as the picture shows.

Several buildings survive from that period, though they tend to show one side of the life of the community.  The Old Stone House itself, which hosts the museum, was built in 1836 as a boarding house for students at the local school.  The Congregational Church dates from much the same period, as does a rather fine gold coloured house, occupied by someone named Samuel Read Hall, who was briefly the principal of the Grammar School and minister at the church.  There are a couple of barns and a blacksmith’s shop, but the hotel – named the Rice & Going Hotel, no idea why – is now privately owned.  So the ensemble of buildings show more about the life of the mind than about that of the body.

Brownington is about halfway between Boston and Montreal, a bit over 200 miles away, so between 3 and 4 hours drive.  In practice, it feels worlds away from either.  And that might be an interesting insight into the experience of at least the first-time traveller, setting out for a distant city they didn’t know, and passing through a quiet rural area, with plenty of time to think about whether the journey was going to take them where they wanted to be.