N.B.'s first highways 'nuts by modern standards,' says history buff
Roadside History's James Upham says the roads brought with them the rise of the stagecoach as means of travel
It's almost a New Brunswick pastime, complaining about the state of the roads.
While motorists may decry the state of some of the province's four-lane highways, those kind of conditions would have been unheard of in the 19th century, when the Westmorland Great Road was king of over-land transport in the province.
"So you're leaving Saint John around about 7:00 in the morning and you're getting into Amherst at about 1:30 the next morning," James Upham, CBC's Roadside History columnist, said, describing one of the "express routes" through the province.
"[That's] nuts by modern standards when you can do that in a matter of a couple of hours at this point. But that was the way that people got around. It was the norm."
The Westmorland Great Road was one of several "great roads," which stretched through the province in the early to mid-1800s, that revolutionized travel in the region.
The road is still in use today, but makes up separate chunks of several highways ranging from the Trans-Canada to rural stretches of dirt road.
Prior to that, most travel was done on the water, either along rivers or on the ocean.
There were local roads and routes, but Upham said these weren't maintained to a high standard.
"For a real long time, there wasn't a whole lot of impetus to build or improve the roads that we had in the province," said Upham.
That started to change around 1810, he said, when the province started to improve existing roads and footpaths to better improve access to communities not along the coast or a major river.
The stagecoach
The rise of the great roads brought with them the rise of the stagecoach as a means of travel.
The system of stagecoach routes had multiple facets, including the roads, the coaches and the inns and terminals along the way.
Upham said stops along the way were important for the stagecoach operators.
For one it wasn't particularly fast to travel by stagecoaches.
"You know, 14 or 15 kilometres an hour would have been kind of a blisteringly fast pace," said Upham.
In addition, it wasn't as if the coaches were a comfortable experience for the riders.
"You're crammed into one of these things with like nine people, said Upham. "There's people on the roof, very likely there's people sitting outside. Some of the earliest ones weren't even covered."
This meant stagecoaches would stop every 20 kilometres so people could stretch their legs, get a bite to eat or spend the night at an inn.
But this system of transport wasn't cheap to build or maintain.
"This was an expensive proposition and it had to be propped up by the government," said Upham.
"There were funds made available to the companies that were doing this simply because it just cost so much."
The journey
Even with this funding the journey could still be treacherous.
Stagecoaches used leather springs for cushioning, which could snap, making an already unpleasant journey almost unbearable.
Bridges could be out and horses could be injured. An axle could break stranding people far from help.
"You didn't just hop onto a stagecoach for kicks," said Upham.
"It was a genuinely unpleasant journey in many respects."
Before the aforementioned express routes, express being a relative term, Upham described a journey from Saint John to Amherst taking two days.
You'd start off in Saint John in the morning, spending the night in Petitcodiac.
The next morning you'd be on the road again, likely taking lunch in Moncton.
Then there would be quick stops in Dorchester and Sackville before arriving in Amherst that evening.
Today it takes a little over two hours to drive from Saint John to Amherst, or a little over two and a half if you make each stop.
But to just talk about the speed of the journey is missing some of the point. The road wasn't just about transportation, but connections.
"The idea here was to actually connect communities, so people could get where they were going to and where they were going from," said Upham.
"This is why you sort of see it meander around like you do."
With files from Khalil Akhtar