The New York and Albany Post Road From Kings Bridge to "The Ferry at Crawlier, over against Albany," Being an Account of a Jaunt on Foot Made at Sundry Convenient Times — Reading Notes

A Pace That Shapes the Prose

Hine's walking speed determines not only what he sees but how he writes. The narrative lingers on details that would blur at higher velocity: the way a milestone set on the west side of the road served as a compass on cloudy days, or how a single shingle pierced by a Revolutionary War shot has been left in place to mark the difference between hand-split and machine-sawed wood. These observations are not decorative; they are the yield of a method that values the incidental over the monumental.

The prose itself mirrors the walker's rhythm. Sentences are often short and declarative, pausing to examine a relic before moving on. Hine does not rush to judgment or conclusion. When he notes that the trolley tracks “run through the grass by the roadside” and “hardly mar the beauty of the landscape,” the qualification is typical: he acknowledges change without lamenting it, preferring to describe what is present rather than what has been lost.

Voice Between Anecdote and Archive

Hine's narrative voice shifts between the colloquial and the antiquarian. He refers to walking as “Shanks' mare,” quotes George William Curtis on the Hudson's “lakes of a dream,” and recounts an Indian legend with the wry observation that it has “the same comfortable and satisfying outcome as the old-fashioned romance.” The legend itself—a Pequod chief, a captive maiden, a Huron attack, a wizard disguise—is told in full, with Hine's dry aside about realism versus romance.

Yet the same paragraph that delivers the legend also notes that the name Poughkeepsie is “said to be spelled some forty-two different ways in the old town records.” This juxtaposition of folk tale and philological fact is characteristic. Hine treats both as equally valid evidence of the road's layered past. He does not privilege one mode over the other; the walker's curiosity is omnivorous.

The Road as a Record of Change

Hine is attentive to what remains and what has vanished. The Livingstone house still stands, but its sheltered harbor has been filled in by a manufacturing concern. The Van Kleeck house, once a tavern where delegates to the first Continental Congress met, “has disappeared.” The milestone marked “80 M. from N. York” reposes at a corner of the mansion, removed from its original station. These are not presented as losses to be mourned but as facts to be noted.

The walker's method allows him to register change without nostalgia. He observes that the trolley poles “blend with the trees” and that the modern convenience “hardly mars the beauty of the landscape.” The tone is matter-of-fact. Hine is not writing an elegy for the old road; he is documenting what a pedestrian can still see, and what has been altered, in the early years of the twentieth century.

Readers who approach this book expecting a continuous narrative or a systematic history will need to adjust. Hine's account is episodic, shaped by the contingencies of a walk undertaken at “sundry convenient times.” The value lies in the accumulation of small observations—a milestone's position, a shingle's age, a legend's formulaic ending. To read it well is to adopt something of the author's pace: slow enough to notice what speed obscures, and patient enough to let the road reveal itself piece by piece.

Walking the old Post Road this spring, pausing where the orchards opened toward the Hudson, I kept thinking how a journey’s quietude lingers long after the route is mapped. That same unhurried noticing—sun on unfamiliar water, names drifting past—came back with Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California — Story, Setting & Ideas, another record of places measured in footsteps and weather, not miles.