By Andrew Amelinckx
Appeared in The Register-Star, January 27, 2008
An old sign, which stands near the intersection of routes 31 and 9 in Blue Stores, reads, “Highland Turnpike. Incorporated in 1804. An early road.” This sign doesn’t give much, barely a hint, of the significance of the road that is now Route 9, which runs through Columbia County – north to Albany and south to New York City and its most famous thoroughfare – Broadway.
Today’s Route 9 follows the basic path, on the east side of the Hudson River, of earlier roads used throughout history. “As was customary in the history of roads, the old Albany Post Road began its life as an Indian trail, winding along near the Hudson River and making a more or less indirect course to Albany,” wrote Porter Sargent in “A Handbook of New England,” published in 1916.
The trail then saw use by a stagecoach company which began a weekly route from New York City to Albany in 1785, according to Maureen Morgan in “The Origins of Route 9 Between Albany and New York.”
Another historian, Charles Gilbert Hine, writing in “The Old Albany and Post Road,” published in 1905, stated that the stage coach company was begun in 1786 by three Columbia County men: Isaac Van Wyck, Talmage Hall and John Kinney. “The state granted to these men the exclusive right ‘to erect, set up, carry on and drive stage-wagons’ between New York and Albany on the east side of Hudson's River,” stated Hine. The price was four pence per mile and the trips took place once a week. Taverns began springing up on this route, including one owned by Abraham Van Buren, the father of the eighth United States President, Martin Van Buren.
“This inn received no little patronage from the stagecoach travelers. The English engineer, James Montressor, writes in his Journal of leaving New York May 2, 1759, and of breakfasting at Kinderhook May 5th. He also records that in December 1759, he left Albany at noon with four sleighs, and stopped at Van Buren’s at Kinderhook,” wrote Edward Augustus Collier in “A History of Old Kinderhook,” published in 1914.
At the beginning of the 19th century, New York state – it’s resources stretched thin – began chartering turnpike companies to build roads using private capitol. The companies would then set up toll-gates to collect money in the hopes of recouping their investment. One such organization, the Highland Turnpike Company, was originally incorporated in 1806 (not 1804) “for the purpose of making a good and sufficient road” from Kingsbridge to the city of Hudson, according to the on-line magazine Postscripts. The company later extended its operations further north to Albany, according to Stephen B. Miller writing in 1862 in “Sketches of Hudson.” Kingsbridge was the northern terminus of Manhattan in what is now the Bronx. The bridge connected Manhattan to the mainland and was built by Frederick Philipse in 1693. Broadway, in Manhattan and further north, is a part of the same road and the Highland Turnpike Company did much work on the northern end of that avenue.
When the company acquired the rights to improve the road, it was then known as the Farmer's Turnpike and would later be known as both the old New York and Albany Post Road and the Highland Turnpike. The company was run by Joseph Howland, who made his fortunes in Norwich, Conn., by trading in the West Indies. He was born in Boston in 1749 and, according to Franklyn Howland, writing in 1885 in “A Brief Genealogical History of Arthur, Henry and John Howland, and Their Descendants,” Joseph Howland moved to New York with his family in 1802, but “still continued [to be] prominent in Norwich affairs ... being a director in several financial institutions, and president of the Norwich Insurance Co.” He was also a partner in the firm of Joseph Howland & Son, a large shipping company “possessing the ship Centurion and fifteen or twenty brigs, schooners and sloops.” In Columbia County, the Highland Turnpike Company erected a toll-gate “at the old Philip D. Rockefeller place” in Clermont, according to Capt. Franklin Ellis, a local 19th century historian, writing in 1878. The era of turnpikes only lasted about 30 years due to high maintenance costs. Most of the companies failed to show a profit, and competition from Hudson River traffic and railroads also helped in their demise, according to Postscripts. The Highland Turnpike Company merged with the Hudson River Railroad in 1831. Howland then retired, and died six years later.
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