Home

America’s Highway is a travelogue. It’s the story of my trip along US Route 1 and of the people who make their lives along its length and the communities in which they live.

The story begins in Maine, hard on the border with New Brunswick, Canada. It ends 2,377 miles later at the shore of the Atlantic Ocean in Key West, Florida. Along the way, US 1 passes through cities large and small, and through fishing towns and farm communities. It hugs the coast in some places, plunging inland at others.

This Web site and the book to follow will explore life along Route 1 with text and photos, videos and audio reports. While firmly rooted in the present, the book will also explore the history of the road and of the role it played in the birth of the nation that arose along its length.

In 1673, King Charles II, decreeing the first postal service in the Colonies, urged his American subjects to “enter into close correspondency with one another.” And they did. When “America” was still a collection of 13 colonies, clinging to the eastern seaboard and struggling to survive, the road was carrying the Royal Mail.

By 1751, Benjamin Franklin, having been appointed Royal postmaster for the Crown’s northern colonies, set out to regularize mail service. After inventing an odometer, Franklin set left Pennsylvania with a wagonload of stone mile markers. Depositing one each mile, Franklin’s workmen laid out the path of what would come to be called the King’s Highway or the Post Road. Similar development took place in the southern colonies. Eventually, the road would pass through all of the original thirteen colonies. In places along its length, US Route 1 is still called “The King’s Highway.”

In 1774, with the colonies at the edge of revolt, Paul Revere rode the “Old Post Road” up from Boston to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to warn patriots there that King George III had outlawed possession of gunpowder by his restive American subjects. The New Hampshire patriots hid their powder. A year later the Minutemen used it to kill Redcoats at Lexington and Concord. Eighty years later, Confederate and Union soldiers marched down it into history in the cauldron of the Civil War.