Old Connecticut Path

The Old Connecticut Path is one of New England's oldest overland routes, a trail that the Indigenous peoples of the region used long before the English arrived and that the English promptly adopted as their own. In sixteen thirty-six, the Reverend Thomas Hooker led a group of roughly one hundred colonists from Newtown, now Cambridge, west across Massachusetts toward the Connecticut River Valley, following what became known as the Old Connecticut Path. The trail ran roughly through what is now Watertown, Waltham, and Framingham before turning south toward Connecticut.

Within a generation of English settlement, the path had been widened for cart traffic, and by the eighteenth century segments of it had become formal post roads. Today several stretches survive as named local roads, and Routes Nine and one hundred twenty-six roughly follow portions of the original alignment. The trail is a reminder that American infrastructure is often prehistoric, that the roads we drive trace routes first worn by feet.