Such a highway was the Norfolk and Bristol Turnpike, the grand avenue of public travel between Boston and Providence, and one link of the continuous thoroughfare connecting New England with New York and Washington.  It was opened during the years of intense activity that marked the infancy of the nation, and it had a distinct corporate existence and history, like the railroad that ruined it, and was owned and operated by a stock company.  Though the entire road was not fifty miles in length, the original enterprise contemplated only a section thereof, which, in accordance with an act of incorporation passed by the State Legislature in 1802, was built from the court-house in Dedham, the shire town of Norfolk County, to the north precinct meeting-house in Attleborough, then a small border town of Bristol County.

The members of the original corporation that held the franchise of the road were Fisher Ames, James Richardson, and Timothy Gay, Jr., of Dedham; Timothy Whitney and John Whiting, of Roxbury; Eliphalet Slack, Samuel S. Blackinton, William Blackinton, Israel Hatch, Elijah Daggett, and Joseph Holmes, of Attleborough; Ephraim Starkweather, Oliver Wilkinson, and Ozias Wilkinson, of Pawtucket, Rhode Island.  They were all enterprising business men in their day, well known throughout Eastern Massachusetts, and the undertaking for which they combined seemed as vast to the rural denizens of the towns through which it passed as did the Pacific Railroad enterprise to capitalists twenty years ago.  To the surprise of the honest farmers, who considered the crooked county roads good enough for them, it made almost a straight line from one terminus to the other, and was laid out four rods in width—­a reckless waste of land—­as a preventive against snow blockades in winter Instead of following the windings of valley and stream as other roads did, this pike mounted directly over all interposing hills, in accordance with the most approved theories of civil engineers of that day; and where sections of those old thoroughfares still remain intact, it is amusing to observe at what steep, straight grades they were made to climb the most abrupt ascent, curving neither to the right nor to the left in merciful consideration for the horses.

But it must not be supposed that public stage-coach travel on the route here indicated began with the opening of the Norfolk and Bristol Turnpike.  The first conveyance of the kind started on its devious way over the poor county roads from Boston to Providence in 1767; and the quaint Jedediah Morse records that twelve years later the “intercourse of the country barely required two stages and twelve horses on this line”; but the same authority states that in 1797 twenty stages and one hundred horses were employed, and that the number of different stages leaving Boston during the week was twenty.