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Six Indian Trails That Turned Into Scenic Highways and Byways

The Indian trails that crisscrossed New England go back to prehistoric times.

Native Americans migrated from summer to winter homes along the paths, often worn bare by centuries of travel. They used the trails for hunting, trading and making war.

When the English colonists arrived, they owed a debt of gratitude for the Indian trails, wrote Chester B. Price in his book, Historic Indian Trails of New Hampshire.

“[T]hanks to the Indians, the early New Englanders inherited a vast network of trails which not only covered the New England states, but extended as far west as the Rocky Mountains,” Price wrote.

The Mohawk Trail and Kennebec Trail were two of the most famous Indian trails in New England. During the American Revolution, they were used for military maneuvers. Benedict Arnold followed both, the Kennebec Trail to his regret and the Mohawk Trail to his satisfaction – he captured Fort Ticonderoga at the end of it.

We identified six scenic driving routes that follow old Indian trails, at least one in each state. Some have been researched more thoroughly than others. If you know of scenic old Indian trails that can be driven today, please share them in the comments section.

The Old Connecticut Path

The Oliver Ellsworth House lies near one of Connecticut’s Indian trails.

The Old Connecticut Path was one of the most important Indian trails, stretching from Massachusetts Bay to the Connecticut River. In the early 1630s Nipmuck Indians loaded their surplus corn onto birch-bark backpacks and walked from the Connecticut River to Massachusetts Bay. There they traded their corn for copper and iron goods and woolen cloth.

John Oldham, whose death started the Pequot War, followed the Old Connecticut Path to explore the continent’s interior in 1633.

In 1636, the Rev. Thomas Hooker spent two weeks on the Old Connecticut Path with his followers to Hartford.

The Rev. John Wareham also led his congregation along the Old Connecticut Path to Windsor, Conn. John Adams followed that route from Tolland to Windsor in 1771. “Today I rode through paradise,” Adams wrote.

There is no consensus the exact location of the Old Connecticut Path from beginning to end, though genealogical researchers are working on it.

They concluded Adams took a part of the path that goes from the Tolland Green Historic District through the towns of Ellington, East Windsor and South Windsor. Then he went on to the Palisado Green in Windsor.

Generally, the Old Connecticut Path went through Massachusetts heading west along the Charles River in Cambridge, curved south in Wayland through Framingham, to Webster and to Lake Chaubunagungamaug. In Connecticut it continued to Hartford, Wethersfield and Windsor.

Today you can download apps that guide driving tours along parts of the Old Connecticut Path in Northeast Connecticut. You can follow John Adams’ route, or you can take other routes that go from Webster, Mass., to Tolland or Woodstock in Connecticut. Another Connecticut route goes from Woodstock to the Willimantic River. (Click here for more information about driving tours.)

Waldoboro Mast Trail (Route 220)

Downtown Waldoboro, which hasn’t changed much since this postcard was published, lies at the end of one of Maine’s old Indian trails.

Maine’s Indians used a vast network of canoe trails to get around, and to reach them they used a series of Indian trails from the interior to the coast. Carrying places, or portages, gave Maine tribes mobility throughout the region. It also let them trade extensively with each other and later with Europeans.

Indian paths from inland Maine to the coast also gave the Native Americans access to fur, birch bark and moose hide. One such path is known as the Waldoboro Mast Trail, which now follows Route 220 from Montville to Waldoboro. It was the most direct route from Lake St. George to the shellfish beds of the seacoast.

Wawenoc Indian families migrated along the path from the seasonal hunting camp to the seasonal fishing camp. They hunted for moose and beaver in the winter and brought their fur as trade goods to the coast using snowshoes, sledges and toboggans.

English settlers found the trail a convenient route to carry masts and spars for hundreds of the King’s ships built in Waldoboro.

Today Route 220 winds through rural Maine from Montville, which has several historic properties and the Frye Mountain Wildlife Management Area. It passes through the scenic towns of Liberty, home of Lake George and the Davistown Museum, and Washington. Travelers know Waldoboro for its commercial clutter on Route 1, which includes the popular eatery Moody’s Diner. The town itself has five nature preserves, a traditional downtown and eight sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

For a map of Route 220, click here.

Mohawk Trail

The Mohawk Trail.

The Mohawk Trail, one of the most famous Indian trails, today is one of the most beautiful drives in Massachusetts. Originally a trade route, it connected the Atlantic Indian tribes with the Iroquois tribes in Upstate New York and Canada.

The trail became a warpath when Mohawk war parties traveled it to destroy Pocumtuck settlements. Metacomet, or King Philip, took the Mohawk trail in 1676 to try to enlist the Mohawks in his cause (he failed). Benedict Arnold then took the Mohawk Trail on his way to capture Fort Ticonderoga.

In 1914, the Massachusetts General Court declared the 63-mile Mohawk Trail a scenic tourist route – the first in the United States.

Today Routes 2 and 2A follow the Mohawk Trail in Massachusetts from Athol to Williamstown. Boosters claim 100 scenic and culture attractions, including the Hail to the Sunrise statue, the Bridge of Flowers, a natural bridge, glacial potholes, pre-revolutionary homes in Old Deerfield, old growth forests and views of the Berkshire and Taconic Mountains.

Highway markers designate the trail. Click here for Mohawk Trail driving tours.

Winnicoek Trail

A seaside estate at Little Boar’s Head along one of New Hampshire’s many old Indian trails.

The Winnicoek Trail ran along the coast from the Merrimack River in Massachusetts through Winnicoek, now Hampton, and along the seashore to the Piscataqua River at Strawbery Banke, now Portsmouth.

The Pennacook and Abenaki Indians migrated along the path in the summer to what is now Odiorne Point. It’s a wooded park along the shoreline with sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean and the Town of New Castle.

When the English colonists arrived in 1635, they used the Winnicoek Trail as a bridle path. Today it’s scenic Route 1A, also known as Ocean Boulevard, running along New Hampshire’s 18-mile shoreline.

Ocean Boulevard passes the wide, sandy beaches in Salisbury, Mass., and Hampton, N.H., then climbs a rocky promontory. Seaside estates begin at the Little Boar’s Head historic district and continue through Rye. Take a detour along Route 1B to wind through the quaint town of New Castle and past the grand old Wentworth-By-The-Sea Hotel. Route 1A finally ends in Portsmouth, a historic seaside city with many fine restaurants and Federal style homes.

Click here for a map of Route 1A.

Pequot Path

Route 1A turns into Ocean Road and the Narragansett Pier.

For hundreds of years, Narragansett and Pequot Indians traveled along the Pequot Path. It ran about 69 miles near the mainland shore from Providence to New London, Conn.

In 1636, Roger Williams took the Pequot path through Apponaug (Warwick) on his journey from Providence to the trading post at Cocumscussoc (near Wickford). “It is admirable to see what paths their naked hardened feet have made in the wilderness in the most stony and rockie places,” he wrote. Williams probably saw a dozen Narragansett villages along 20 miles of the path.

English settlers began using the Pequot Path until it evolved into the lower part of the Boston Post Road. Today, parts of scenic Route 1A (not to be confused with US Route 1A) follow the old Pequot path along the South Coast.

Scenic Route 1A follows the shore from Wickford to Narragansett, past the John H. Chafee Nature Preserve, a good spot to get out and walk to Narragansett Bay. Or, take a detour to the Gilbert Stuart Birthplace. The road passes large, exclusive homes, with views of the bay and the historic Casey Farm. FInally it feeds into Ocean Road past Town Beach to Narragansett Pier.

Click here to see how the Lower Post Road follows existing roads in Rhode Island.

Route 22A

Vergennes, a city that grew up along one of Vermont’s Indian trails.

Route 22A through the Lake Champlain Valley in Vermont was once part of a network of well-worn Indian trails linking villages and other overland trail networks. The western Abenakis of Vermont also used waterways such as the Connecticut River and Lakes Champlain and Memphremagog.

The St. Francis Indians came down from Canada along the trail by Lake Champlain to find warmer fishing grounds. The trail finally stretched to the Bronx, N.Y., where it became known as ‘the road to Bedford and Vermont.’ Today Vermont Route 22A is a continuation of New York Route 22A and a scenic drive in foliage season.

Route 22A goes from Ferrisburgh to historic Vergennes, Vermont’s oldest city. It then runs through Addison, Bridport, Shoreham, Orwell and Fair Haven on the New York border. Along the way lie the Chimney Point State Historic Site, dairy farms, rolling hills, white church steeples, and country inns.

Images: Old County Jail and Museum, Tolland, Conn. By Photograph by Greg O’Beirne – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1391441; Hail to the Sunrise, By This mediaToddC4176 (talk)Original workJoseph Pollia, 1893-1954. – self-made, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36285807; Bridge of Flowers By FFM784 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61250392; https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57432594; Little Boar’s Head By Teemu08 at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1798424; Narragansett Pier By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57432594.

This story about New England Indian trails was updated in 2022.

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Happy St. Jean Baptiste Day! Live Free and Eat Poutine!

Many Americans view Bastille Day as the big French holiday, but for Franco-Americans from Canada it’s St. Jean Baptiste Day on June 24.

The holiday dates to medieval Europe, not coincidentally near the summer solstice. It started as a pagan celebration of midsummer. In the 6^th century, the French king Clovis Christianized the holiday to celebrate the birth of St. John the Baptist, precursor of Christ and the light of the world. From then the French monarch would light huge bonfires on the night of June 23.

French Catholics continued to celebrate St. Jean Baptiste Day when they came to North America. A pious festival, it featured religious processions in the street. But the celebration lost its importance when the British conquered New France.

St. Jean Baptiste Day Revived

Then in 1834 a newspaper editor named Ludger Duvernay organized a grand patriotic banquet in Montreal on June 24. ‘O Canada’ was sung publicly for the first time at the 1880 St. Jean Baptiste banquet.

By the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, St. Jean Baptiste Day featured processions in Montreal, Quebec City and Little Canadas in the United States. In 1930, for example, the Willimantic, Conn., L’Union de St. Jean Baptiste celebrated its 50th anniversary with a three-day festival in late June.

A carillon flag waved on St. Jean Baptiste Day in Quebec

Today, Francophone New England celebrates St. Jean Baptiste Day with music, food and dance–at least in disease-free years.

Celebrations–Or Not

In Lewiston, Maine, for example, the Franco Center often holds a FÊTE de Saint Jean Baptiste Concert: “It’s All About Love,” on the afternoon of June 24. Though canceled in 2020, the event resumed in 2021 with an invitation for all to BE French Canadians. Marie-Line Morin planned to sing songs of love, like Plaisir d’Amour, I Dreamed a Dream and Bring Him Home (from Les Misérables).

Manchester, with one of New England’s preeminent Little Canadas, has an entire Franco-American Day, at least in years free of pandemics. As part of the celebration, the city stages Poutinefest – a competition among restaurants for the best poutine. For the uninitiated, it’s a traditional comfort food of French fries, cheese curds and gravy. The winner gets to raise the Ceinture de Championnat/Championship Belt. The event was scheduled to take place on Oct. 15, 2022.

Winooski, Vt., also celebrates French Heritage Day in normal times. The town has held it in mid-July with music, food and a tourtiere contest. The Winooski Historical Society Museum and the Heritage Winooski Mill open as well.

Lowell, Mass., celebrates its Franco-American heritage with a French Mass and a week-long festival, Franco-American Week. After a hiatus in 2020, the event resumed in 2021. It usually includes church suppers, a French Canadian documentary film, French music and bingo in French.

And in Southern New England

Rhode Island canceled its 2020 French Heritage Festival in September in Woonsocket (click here) because of the pandemic. No word yet on whether it will resume in 2022.

St. John the Baptist is also one of the two patron saints of the Freemasons (St. John the Evangelist is the other). In Connecticut, Freemasons celebrate June 24 with a special dinner.

Photo: PoutineBy Yuri Long from Arlington, VA, USA – road_trip-9349.jpg, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19029778. Carillon flag by C.P. Champion via Wikipedia. Poutine in featured image By Camelia.boban – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62105616. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Great Windham Frog Fight of 1754

The bizarre story of the Great Windham Frog Fight spread across the United States and all the way to Europe during the 18^th century.

Willimantic Frog Bridge

People celebrated it in song and print in the 19^th century and commemorated by 11-foot frog sculptures in the 20^th. In addition, those sculptures appeared in a Zippy the Pinhead comic in the 21^st.

One 1851 ballad, called The Bull-Frog Fight. A Ballad of the Olden Time, begins the tale:

A direful story must I tell,
Should I at length relate,
What once a luckless town befell,
In ‘wooden nutmeg’ State.

The Windham Frog Fight

Here’s the story of the Great Windham Frog Fight: In the summer of 1754, tensions ran high in the frontier town of Windham, Conn., because the French and Indian War had broken out in May. At the same time a drought threatened the farming community’s crops.

Shortly after midnight on a hot, muggy night in June, the residents of the town of Windham woke to a hideous sound, a shrieking, clattering roar.

The frightened townspeople jumped from their beds.

Some thought the horrifying sounds were the war whoops of attacking Indians. Some thought they were the trumpets of Judgment Day. Others thought they were native Americans saying ‘gin’ and ‘rum.’ An elderly African-American man argued it couldn’t be the Day of Judgment because it was nighttime.

Some terrified villagers thought they could hear the sound of names being called out: ‘Col. Dyer’ and ‘Elderkin’ — two of the town’s militia leaders.

Lawyer Eliphalet Dyer – described by John Adams as ‘longwinded’ and ‘tedious’ but an ‘honest, worthy man’ — led the town’s militia in military readiness.

Jedidiah Elderkin was another lawyer who, with Dyer, planned to colonize the Susquehanna Valley. Windhamites may have thought the plan would anger the Indians.

The militiamen were said to have fired their muskets into the darkness throughout the night. By morning, the sound died down, and the townspeople celebrated their victory in the Great Windham Frog Fight.

Oops

But as dawn broke, a scouting party ventured out toward the place from where the sound came. They realized the embarrassing truth. Hundreds of bullfrog corpses — all belly up — littered the landscape.

The sound had come from a pond belonging to Dyer. Because the drought had dried up all of Windham’s standing water, only a puddle remained at the bottom of the pond. A horde of frogs descended on that one remaining wet spot and fought over it.

What the Windhamites had heard were the battle cries and dying moans of thirsty bullfrogs, magnified by the cloud cover and muggy air.

The story spread far and wide. At least three ballads were written about the Great Windham Frog Fight, while an 1888 operetta, The Frogs of Old Windham, drew audiences throughout Connecticut.

After the American Revolution, the Windham Bank issued banknotes with an image of a frog standing over the body of another frog.

The Willimantic section of Windham grew into a factory town that produced silk and cotton thread. The American Thread Company located on the banks of the Willimantic River and became Connecticut’s largest employer.

Today, four 11-foot frogs sitting atop giant spools of thread guard the Thread City Crossing, or Frog Bridge.

Windhamites renamed the frog battlefield Frog Pond, which you can see today a mile east of Windham Center on the Scotland Road. Look on the left as you cross Indian Hollow Brook.

“Willimantic Frog Bridge 1” by Grendelkhan at English Wikipedia. Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Featured image By Carol M. Highsmith – Library of Congress Catalog: http://lccn.loc.gov/2012630525Image download: https://cdn.loc.gov/master/pnp/highsm/19000/19098a.tifOriginal url: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/highsm.19098, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51655474,

This story about the Windham frog fight was updated in 2022.

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Opera Star Eileen Farrell Meets A Nice Irish Cop

Eileen Farrell spent five years starring on the Metropolitan Opera stage, but she was too salt-of-the earth to put up with the opera world’s pretensions for long. She hung out with stagehands and liked to tell dirty jokes. And she was married — happily — to a New York cop.

Farrell was an unusually versatile singer who could sing an aria as well as belt out a blues number. Though perhaps that’s what you’d expect from an Irish-Catholic Connecticut girl whose parents once performed in vaudeville.

Eileen Farrell

She was born in Willimantic, Conn., on Feb. 13, 1920, to The Singing O’Farrells, a vaudeville husband-and wife duo. The family moved frequently, to Storrs, Conn., where they taught music at the University of Connecticut, and then to Norwich, Conn.

They then moved to Woonsocket, R.I., where Father Cornelius J. Holland, the pastor at St. Charles Borromeo Church, encouraged Eileen’s singing career.

At 19, Eileen Farrell moved to New York City to see if she could make it as a singer. When she auditioned in 1940 for the CBS Chorus, she sang the only aria she knew, Vissi d’arte. She got the job. The next year, she got her own radio show singing classical and popular music. It was called Eileen Farrell Sings.

She had started to make enough money to buy first-class clothes. A couturier named Herman Patrick Tappe designed several outfits that suited her new celebrity status. One day, someone forged a check in Tappe’s name for $10,000. He called the police and a member of the NYPD forgery squad responded. His name was Robert Reagan.

St. Charles Borromeo

Two Nice Irish People

Reagan looked at Tappe’s client list and recognized Farrell’s name. “I listen to her on the radio every week,” he said. Tappe replied, “Well, her name is Farrell and yours is Reagan. You’re a nice Irishman, and she’s a nice Irish girl. Why don’t the two of you come out some time and have lunch with me?”

They did. Then he asked her out. On their first date he treated her to two lobsters. After that, they started seeing each other regularly. “I wasn’t used to being treated like an Irish princess,” she wrote. “But I was starting to think that maybe I could learn.”

They married on April 5, 1946, had two children and then lived happily ever after for the next 40 years. The couple had a home on Staten Island and spent vacations at their house in Castine, Maine.

Eileen Farrell Gets a Break

The year after her wedding, Eileen Farrell began touring as a concert soprano in 1947. Her big break came when she dubbed vocals for Eleanor Parker in Interrupted Melody, a 1955 film about an opera star’s comeback.

Farrell launched her opera career in 1956 and sang for five years at the Metropolitan Opera. She made 22 curtain calls the first time she appeared at the Met in the title role of Gluck’s Alceste. One New York Times critic said when she sang at Carnegie Hall you could hear her in Newark.

But she wasn’t impressed with the pretension of opera. The Metropolitan Opera’s haughty general manager, Rudolf Bing, wasn’t impressed with her. “Bing, who was never comfortable with easygoing American personalities, found Ms. Farrell’s irreverence hard to deal with,” wrote the New York Times in her obituary. Their chilly relationship probably shortened her opera career, the Times opined.

During the ‘60s she appeared both as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and on television variety shows. She also sang and clowned in sketches with Jonathan Winters and Carol Burnett. She is credited with the first crossover hit, I’ve Got a Right To Sing the Blues, an album recorded in 1960.

You can get a sense of her big personality — and voice — in this clip of her singing a Cole Porter song with Louis Armstrong.

Widowed

After Bob died in 1986, she bought a condominium in Yarmouth, Maine, close to Portland, where she gave many concerts. She also gave master classes at the University of Maine at Orono.

Her success came as a complete surprise to her. “I really don’t have the faintest idea how it all happened,” she wrote in her autobiography, Can’t Help Singing: The Life of Eileen Farrell.

Eileen Farrell died March 23, 2002, at 82. You can listen to her sing, I’ve Got A Right To Sing the Blues here.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: St. Charles Borromeo By Swampyank – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26730696. Eileen Farrell Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31733911.

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The 1912 Willimantic Textile Workers Strike

In the spring of 1912, Connecticut newspapers ran accounts of the successful Bread and Roses textile workers strike in Lawrence, Mass. Thousands of textile workers, mostly immigrant women and children, had gone out on a two-month strike against the American Woolen Co. The epic struggle resulted in pay increases, double pay for overtime and amnesty for strikers.

Willimantic textile mills

Workers at the Quidnick-Windham Mill in Willimantic, Conn., took notice. Whole families worked in the cotton fabric mill earning poverty wages. The textile workers lived in substandard housing and many relied on public assistance just to survive. On the day after the Bread and Roses strike ended, Quidnick officials told the local newspaper it was extremely doubtful their workers would get a raise.

The Doffers Start

In response, 12 doffers, the mill’s lowest paid workers, went on strike. Their job was to remove full spindles of thread from the looms, a simple but crucial task. The Quidnick general manager feared the doffers’ walkout could spread to the other worker. So he quickly agreed to give the doffers a 25-cent-a-week raise, from $7.25 to $7.50.

Word got around, and two days later 70 Quidnick ring spinners and warpers walked off the job. The doffers joined them in solidarity, though they’d already gotten their raise. The next day, the striking textile workers picketed the Bridge Street office of Quidnick manager W. B. Knight, demanding a 10 percent raise and an end to unpaid overtime.

The weavers had yet to join the strike, and without them it would fail. So the strikers joined hands and formed a human chain in front of the mill’s entrance. As the weavers approached, the strikers urged them to stop work. They did, and 400 striking Quidnick workers marched to Town Hall. They decided to send a workers’ committee to meet with management, and to call in an organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, union.

The Wobblies wanted to organize all workers into one union.

Within 48 hours, the Quidnick company agreed to the workers’ demands. Then the day after the Quidnick victory, a thousand workers at the nearby American Thread Company went on strike — and won a pay hike.

That wasn’t the end of the Willimantic textile workers’ struggles, not by a long shot. But as IWW organizer Ben Legere said in a speech to the workers, “This fight for the uplifting of humanity is no pink teas engagement or afternoon party.”

With thanks to Steve Thornton, whose book A Shoeleather History of the Wobblies, recounts the Willimantic strike. This story was updated in 2022.

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