State agency revives historic milestones along Boston-Springfield route dating back to Colonial era

A historic mile-marker stone, dating to the 1700s, was recently restored in Essex County on the property of the Wenham Town Hall.Courtesy of MassDOT

Historic milestones still mark the way between Boston and Springfield thanks to the ongoing restoration efforts of the Department of Transportation, a state official said.

“I find them to be interesting, because they date from before our country was founded,” MassDOT Cultural Resources Specialist Mary Hafferty said in a recent interview. “The [British] Crown had directed the county governments to install the milestone markers. They are remnants of the past and we don’t have too much left from before the American Revolution just on the roadside.”

Most of the stone markers are along Route 20, formerly the upper Boston Post Road, a historic 17th-century mail route connecting Boston to New York.

The “1767 milestones” are located along the Upper Boston Post Road between the cities of Boston and Springfield, Hafferty said.

If you look closely, on each stone is an engraving showing how far the traveler is from either Boston or Springfield.

Between 2015 and 2018, MassDOT had 29 of the stones restored in a $116,600 project.

Just recently, a historic mile-marker stone, dating to the 1700s and located on the property of the Wenham Town Hall, was restored in Essex County.

While the stone in Essex County just needed a little cleaning, others required more extensive restoration efforts such as installing stainless-steel dowels inside them to put broken stones back together, Hafferty said.

Before (left) and after (right) preservation of Milestone Marker #54. The Milestone Marker had been in storage at the Leicester Public Library. It was then relocated onto the Leicester Town Common/Washburn Square.Courtesy of MassDOT

The Colonial-era artifacts are listed in the National Register of Historic Places, according to MassDOT. Most of the stones restored are granite, although one in Boston is pudding stone and a few are made of sandstone.

“My personal favorites are the ones in Boston,” Hafferty said. “There’s one on Huntington Avenue and it’s the only marker made out of Roxbury pudding stone in the string of markers. I like that one because it shows that they actually found the rocks nearby and installed them very close by.”

Historical records indicate that the earliest markers were installed in Boston, Brighton, and Brookline in 1729 at the direction of Judge Paul Dudley, an associate justice on the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s highest court, according to MassDOT.

“People like to see them,” Hafferty said. “They like them to be in slightly safer locations, so we do hear from locals asking them to be pushed back a little bit, so we did reinstall some of them with setbacks.”

MassDOT is authorized to undertake the milestone marker preservation project under Chapter 621 of the Acts of 1960. In this act, the Legislature directed the Massachusetts Department of Public Works (now MassDOT) “to maintain and restore the milestone markers on the Old Boston Post Road.”

“If people see a milestone marker in distress that needs help, contact MassDOT and we can help people figure it out,” Hafferty said. “They are important to our country’s history, and it is good to preserve them.”