Summer 2010
Vermont Observed
The Lost Wardsboro Road
By Castle Freeman Jr.
Illustrated by Jean Carlson Masseau
Three roads lead from Newfane, a foothill town, west into the Green Mountains. Three roads: two living, one dead.
Well, not dead, exactly — but very quiet, very still. The two living roads run, one to the south, the other to the north of a steep, wooded height of land. They are maintained by the towns they serve: Newfane, Dover and Wardsboro. These roads are (mostly) paved. They are built up, banked and bridged. They are the way home for some hundreds of people who live beside them.
The third road, the quiet one, is maintained by black bears and wild turkeys and is the way home for bobcats and deer. On maps of Windham County dating from the mid-19th century, this road is shown as a principal thoroughfare from Newfane to the settlement of South Wardsboro. Today it is a principal thoroughfare to nowhere. Most townspeople don’t know it exists. You might call it the Lost Wardsboro Road — if something can be lost that nobody is trying to find.
To reach it, drive northwest out of Newfane village for a couple of miles, then bear left on a dirt road for another piece to a spot pretty well back in the puckerbrush where the road forks. The left fork takes you south to Williamsville. The right fork is the Lost Wardsboro Road, or what’s left of it.
For a little way, the going is pretty good. The road runs above a brook, and you can drive it, slowly, as far as an old stone bridge that crosses the brook and goes uphill into the woods. Now you’re on foot. From this point, at one time, the road made a fairly straight shot bearing about northwesterly for three miles into the town of Wardsboro. In the 1850s, there were apparently six or seven homes and farms along that stretch. Today’s maps show it as a blank. That blank is where you’re going.
Walking up the first half-mile or so of the Lost Wardsboro Road, you soon feel the incline. This road is steep. It was made, not for automobiles and other machines, but for men and horses and the wagons they could pull. Those who made the road, and those who used it, were more interested in getting from here to there by the shortest path than in ease of travel. The road is steep because it’s straight. Today’s road-builders, assisted by heavy equipment, can plan curves and bends that take best advantage of the terrain they have to cover. Road-builders with picks and shovels and bad backs don’t work that way. They aren’t subtle. They go right at the grade, head on — up, over and down the other side.
As a result, on the steep segments, the old roads have washed out. Parts of roads like this one have become long, deep gullies full of boulders. You step from rock to rock, 10 feet or more below the original roadway. For long distances, with the branches of the surrounding forest trees meeting overhead, the road is virtually a tunnel.
From the tunnel you emerge gratefully on level ground at the top of the rise. All around, the woods are thick, but the road is still discernible before you. On the left is the former site of a building. Several buildings, in fact. There’s a cellar hole, barn foundations, a well, stone pens and walls. Whose place was this? Whoever they were, the Lost Wardsboro Road went right past their front door, bringing visitors, trade, news, society. Today, it’s hard to imagine this location as an active, busy place. As you walk on, maybe a partridge flushes before you and rackets off into the woods. Maybe a startled deer pounds away unseen among the trees. This is their home now, not your predecessors’, not yours.
It’s a peculiarity of spots like the Lost Wardsboro Road, where people have lived and built only to move on and leave their works to decay and disappear, that they can seem lonelier, emptier than more remote locations where man has hardly been in the first place. They’re nobody’s idea of wilderness, but visiting them, walking the abandoned roads, passing the ruined farmsteads, you’re in places that are remote in another way: They’re forgotten. They’re as though you’d wandered, not off the map so much as out of time.
The past, too, has an end, however. Soon, you begin to find signs of recent activity: a skidder trail, a slash pile, a landing. Somebody has been logging in here. Then, up ahead, a brightness is visible through the woods. You approach. You’re looking at the metal roof of a house. Now you can see the house itself, a vegetable patch, a parked truck. In a minute, the house dog will begin to bark. Time to turn back. Your walk in the past is about over. Your lost road has been found.
