It was an urgent military resupply mission. With hundreds of troops behind enemy lines and hostile forces threatening them, the commanding general approved a plan to get much-needed reinforcements and materiel to them.
But instead of the helicopters and split-second timing such a mission might imply today, this operation moved at its own 18th-century pace.
The year was 1776 and the commander was Gen. George Washington. The plan would take months to implement because it involved carving a new road, a sort of shortcut, through more than 90 miles of wilderness in what today is Vermont.
The situation was this: During the American Revolution, the Continental Army had tried and spectacularly failed to conquer British-held Canada. Washington and others had believed that, once the invasion force made its presence felt, Canadians would rise up against their British oppressors. It didn’t happen that way.
An American force, led by Gen. Richard Montgomery, had managed to capture Montreal. (Some of the Americans, including Ethan Allen, however, were captured.)
But a second American force, this one led by Col. Benedict Arnold, fared less well. In fairness to Arnold, who was at the time one of the Colonies’ ablest leaders, the task his force faced was daunting. Arnold had set off from Cambridge, Massachusetts, with roughly 1,000 men to make the arduous trek through the Maine woods to Quebec City.
Misery dogged them. The men lost a great deal of their supplies to flooding and ran short of food. By the time they reached Quebec City’s outskirts, widespread illness and mass desertions had cut their number by about a third.
Montgomery left most of his men in Montreal and connected with Arnold near Quebec City. The combined force had between 900 and 1,000 troops. They attacked the walled city during a driving blizzard during the early morning hours of Dec. 31, 1775. The generals couldn’t wait for better weather; the enlistment of many of the troops expired at the stroke of midnight.
The Americans were routed, losing 60 killed, including Montgomery, and more than 400 captured. The survivors withdrew, many heading home, their enlistments having ended. Despite his vastly diminished numbers, Arnold decided to lay siege to Quebec while awaiting reinforcements.
These soldiers and supplies would come from Fort Number Four in Charlestown, New Hampshire. The problem was that the usual path to Quebec was long. It involved following rivers and creeks to Crown Point on the southern end of Lake Champlain, then traveling north on the lake, eventually reaching the St. Lawrence River and Quebec, a total distance of about 165 miles.
Col. Jacob Bayley, one of the first settlers of Newbury, Vermont, wrote Washington to suggest an alternative. He urged the general to have a road cut from Wells River, Vermont, northwest to St. Johns, Quebec. This new road, Bayley argued, would be shorter and faster. Surveyors had found good terrain for such a road, along a route long used by Native Americans. The overland road would be 92 miles long, some 73 miles shorter than following the water route.
Washington received Bayley’s report on April 29, 1776, and loved the idea. “The Time of Congress is so taken up with many objects of Consequence, that it is impossible for them to attend to every Thing,” Washington responded the same day. With Congress busy, he made the decision himself: “(I)t is my opinion and desire, that you set about the Road you propose as soon as possible.”
The general could not spare any soldiers to help with construction, so he told Bayley to hire local workers. “I will provide for the expense,” he promised, “which you will be careful in making as light as possible.”
Bayley hired 110 men, paying them $10 a month, plus food and a half-pint of rum a day. A man referred to as “Indian Joe” (probably Joseph Susaph, a Mi’kmaq who was orphaned and raised by an Abenaki family in Odanak, Quebec) helped plot the route. The men began to cut a road wide enough for a wagon to pass. In wet spots, they used corduroy construction, laying trees across the road and covering them with dirt. A bumpy ride, but better than a quagmire.
After six weeks, the road extended from Wells River through Peacham, proceeding 6 miles past it.
Then Bayley received a startling letter from Washington. “(O)ur Army in Canada, since their retreat from Quebec(,) has met with further Misfortunes,” he informed Bayley. The army might have to retreat out of Canada, or might have already done so, Washington explained.
Route for the enemy, too
The thought that remnants of his invasion force might be heading south apparently gave Washington an idea that, oddly, he hadn’t seriously considered before: British soldiers might also use the new route to come south. The road, if completed, would link to an existing road system that led to Boston. Washington realized it might afford the British “an easy Pass to make Incursions into our Colonies to commit Depredations.”
He warned Bayley that “(t)he Change which has taken Place in our Affairs in that Quarter may render now what was extremely right to be done some Thing very inexpedient and unadvisable.”
Despite the obvious risk that a cross-border road would help an invasion force heading in either direction, Washington did something curious: He left it to Bayley to decide whether to stop construction.
Not surprisingly, Bayley erred on the side of caution and shut down the project. He also might have already done so when he received Washington’s letter, having heard of the army’s condition by deserters heading south.
With the road not yet reaching Quebec, the retreating army followed the traditional water route south to Fort Ticonderoga in New York and Mount Independence in Vermont. Smallpox had broken out among the men during their siege of Quebec; they brought it with them to the Colonies as they retreated.
Despite Washington’s earlier promises, Congress never repaid Bayley for the money he had spent on the endeavor.
Two years later, a road north again seemed advisable. The Continental Army was considering another invasion of Canada. Gen. Moses Hazen was given orders to complete the project.
Bayley and Hazen, whose names are forever attached in the route, the Bayley-Hazen Military Road, were acquainted. Bayley was good friends with Hazen’s brother John, and both held substantial land grants in the Newbury area.
Hazen pushed the work forward cautiously, building blockhouses every few miles along the route and fortifying their perimeters. The men constructed blockhouses in Cabot and Walden and one at Caspian Lake.
As the work progressed, Hazen grew skittish, feeling that his left flank was vulnerable. If an attack came, he hoped to draw it off toward the Newbury area, where he could find militia to reinforce his troops.
The feared attack never came. Nor did the planned invasion of Canada. Hazen halted the road-building once he reached a notch in the mountains of Westfield that today bears his name. The road that started in Newbury petered out after 57 miles.
Washington’s belated concerns about the road being useful to the British proved justified. In fact, some historians suggest that the British got more use out of the road than the Americans. A large British scouting party discovered the trail in 1780 and marked the route, which they used to lead small attacks on Colonial forces stationed near it.
In March 1781, two American soldiers were captured at a house beside the road in Peacham. Six months later, four American scouts were attacked. Two of them, Constant Bliss and Moses Sleeper, were killed and the other two captured. And in June 1782, a small British contingent tried to kidnap Bayley, who was by this point a brigadier general living in Newbury. Bayley, however, had been warned and evaded capture.
For all the debate over the advisability of building the road, and for all the actual labor put into it, the Bayley-Hazen Military Road never proved an important factor in the war. Indeed, some call it “the road from nowhere to nowhere.”
It was, perhaps, more consequential after the war than during it. Small villages — including Ryegate, Peacham, Walden, Greensboro, Albany and Lowell — grew along its route. The first inhabited house in several of those towns was the old blockhouse. Some historians go so far as to say that Bayley and Hazen were partially motivated by dreams of future settlement in the area.
Today roughly three-quarters of the route’s 57 miles is part of the state’s road network. Much of the remainder is returning to what it was when Jacob Bayley first had it surveyed: forest.
