On December 10, 1672, New York Governor Francis Lovelace made an ambitious announcement: monthly postal service between New York and Boston.
Lovelace’s proclamation spurned the creation of Boston Post Road, and laid the foundation for the U.S. Postal Service.
Lovelace considered mail service both “convenient and necessary … for a more speedy Inteligence and Dispatch of Affayres’’ according to the proclamation.
He proclaimed “that a Messenger of Post bee authorized to sett forth from this City of New Yorke monthly, and thence travile to Boston, from whence within that month hee shall returne againe to this City.’’
The job of America’s first postman, whose identity remains a mystery, was not just the delivery of mail from New York to Boston. He was also tasked with setting up a system for mail delivery along the route, marking trees along the route to assist others, and making sure to “detect and cause to bee apprehended all fugitive Souldyers and Servants runn away from these parts.’’
Lovelace’s edict led to the creation of Boston Post Road – sometimes known as King’s Highway – that led from the tip of Manhattan all the way to downtown Boston.
The path that became the country’s first postal route had been blazed long before, by Native Americans who set fire to the plant growth along it each November to keep it passable. But navigating the path was dangerous: travelers were faced with slippery rocks, snakes, frigid temperatures, rushing rivers, and the inherent risk of getting lost along the way.
At certain points, the path was only a foot and a half wide, according to the book The King’s Best Highway.
Until Lovelace introduced the Boston Post Road, mail service was done by courier, and was frequently unreliable. In 1669, some of Lovelace’s own letters disappeared, according to the book American Passage.
But that wasn’t Lovelace’s only motivation.
He worried the Dutch might invade New York, and he wanted to make sure he was able to maintain close communications with New England.
Lovelace’s grand experiment was put to the test on January 22, 1673, when the first mail left New York, bound for Boston.
The journey took the postman approximately 2 weeks, according to the book The Old Post Road.
He traveled from New York to New Haven, then onto Hartford, then Springfield, then Brookfield, Worcester, Cambridge, and finally Boston.
The route remained treacherous long after Lovelace’s 1672 proclamation, as evidenced by the diary of Sarah Kemble Knight, who made the trip in 1704.
Knight described the road as “exceedingly dark’’ and “very bad, incumbered with rocks and mountainous passages.’’
Of the trees lining the route, Knight wrote that “each lifeless Trunk, with its shatter’d Limbs, appear’d an Armed Enymie.’’
