The Day the Road Was Born

You stood up at Whitcomb Summit a little while ago and took in that view. Let me carry you back to a particular day up there — the twenty-second of October, nineteen fourteen — because that's the day this whole road was born, and it was quite a party.

Picture it. The road's just finished, cut fresh across the top of these mountains, and nobody's ever seen anything like it. So they throw a grand dedication right up on Whitcomb Summit, the highest point, and eighteen hundred people come. Eighteen hundred — up a mountain, in nineteen fourteen, when a car was still a rich man's toy and half of them probably came by horse. They stood up there in the October wind with the whole four-state view blazing autumn all around them, and they declared the Mohawk Trail open — the first road in the entire country built not to get you somewhere, but just to show you something beautiful.

And you have to understand what that meant to these hills. This was hard-luck country. The farms were rocky and poor, the young folks were leaving, the mills were the only work. And then this ribbon of pavement drops in from the sky and suddenly the whole world wants to drive up and spend money — on gas, on lunch, on a night in a cabin, on a postcard of the view out their own back door. The road remade these towns. It gave them a future, and that future was you: the traveler, come to see the mountains.

More than a hundred years later, here you are, doing the exact thing those eighteen hundred people stood on that summit to celebrate. There's a straight line from that October day to this drive you're taking right now. Not many roads can say they invented a whole way of traveling. This one can.