The first thirty years of the nineteenth century was the era of canal and turnpike development. In whose brain the idea of a level road to Charlestown, in two unbroken straight lines, originated, we cannot say; probably that of Benjamin Hall, then the leading business man of Medford, who took one-tenth of its capital stock.
Medford was, in 1803, a town of but twelve hundred inhabitants, its only direct route to Boston being the old road over the top of Winter hill, through Charlestown to the Charles river bridge but fourteen years built. It was a long, hard pull up and over the hill, not only for the local teams, but for the much greater volume of traffic and the stages from northern Middlesex and New Hampshire. So this new, shorter, and level route was apparently a feasible, practical and desirable investment. Steam travel was then thirty years in the future, electric power unheard of, and the automobile undreamed of.
There were no serious engineering problems to cope with. It crossed but two water-courses, Two-penny and Winter brooks, both insignificant, though Captain Adams was very early inquiring about their ‘culvits,’ the sluices the charter required. More expensive to build and maintain was the bridge by which it crossed the Middlesex canal near its terminal in Charlestown.
Only at one other point were they two close neighbors —where they crossed the town line. The canal, only the previous year, had used about all the available space in the base of the ledgy hill for its course, and the turnpike company had to build a ‘river wall’ for some distance
