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Historic Stagecoach Returns to Old Sturbridge Village May 24

(Sturbridge, Mass.) - Visitors to Old Sturbridge Village may arrive in mini-vans and school buses, but they'll soon be able to board a stagecoach and experience luxury travel 1830s style. Beginning Memorial Day May 24, 2008, OSV's nine-passenger museum-quality reproduction of an early New England Concord-style stagecoach will offer stagecoach rides throughout the day around the village common. The hand-crafted stagecoach, drawn by a matched pair of horses, is an exact replica of the actual stagecoaches that plied New England's roads in the early 1800s.

Early stagecoaches had to stop every 10 miles or so to pick up passengers and to change tired horses. This "staging" of fresh animals is how "stage" coaches got their name. Then, as now, Sturbridge was a major stopping point for those traveling between New York and Boston, and the old stage line ran directly past the entrance to Old Sturbridge Village on the Worcester-Stafford Turnpike, now known as Stallion Hill Road.

In 19th century Sturbridge, the tavern-keeper and stagecoach agent was Cromwell Bullard, and today's passengers board the stage at Old Sturbridge Village's Bullard Tavern. The tavern's bar room houses a new exhibit on travel and tavern life. Another new exhibit in the Firearms and Textiles building will include a tin coaching horn and a blunderbuss, a shotgun-like weapon sometimes carried by stage drivers as protection from would-be robbers. Old Sturbridge Village stagecoach rides are $5,with museum admission. For details: www.osv.org or call 1-800-SEE-1830.

Thanks to Hollywood and TV westerns, most people associate Concord stagecoaches with the American West, but it was New England wheelwrights and coach builders who supplied the nation with tens of thousands of stagecoaches and other horse-drawn conveyances. The most famous was the Abbot & Downing Coach Works in Concord, NH, which gave the "Concord stage" its name.

Long before Concord stagecoaches plied the prairies, hundreds of competing stagecoach lines carried passengers along the main streets and back roads of New England, connecting countless small towns to the region's major markets, seaports, canal boats, steamships and railway hubs.

Many young New England farmers found new careers as stagecoach drivers, among them Silas Freeman of Sturbridge, whose family farm is part of Old Sturbridge Village, restored as working farm where historic interpreters demonstrate farming practices of the 1830s. One of Silas Freeman's most famous passengers was President John Quincy Adams, no doubt en route to Boston or home to Quincy, Mass.

Although Concord stages were made with leather straps underneath to allow the carriage to sway and cushion the ride, the trips over early New England dirt roads were still bumpy, dusty and tiring. The 210-mile trip from Boston to New York took a day and a half. By the 1830s travelers often made the trip by starting off on a stagecoach, and then connecting to trains and steamboats for the rest of the journey.

Stagecoaches were a common sight among the vehicles traversing early New England's highways. Badger and Porter's Stage Register annually listed the schedules and routes of hundreds of competing stage lines moving passengers around the region.

In the early 1800s, the 63-mile Hartford and Worcester stagecoach trip took 12 hours, leaving at 7:00 a.m. with stops in Vernon, Tolland, Stafford Springs, Wales, Brimfield, Sturbridge, Charlton, South Leicester and arriving in Worcester at 7:00 p.m. The same trip today takes little more than an hour.

Passengers bound for Sturbridge from Providence could make the trip in about seven hours on the Providence and Southbridge line, boarding a stage at the Manufacturers Hotel in downtown Providence with stops in Killingly, Pomfret, Woodstock, Dudley, Webster, Oxford, Charlton and Sturbridge before continuing on to Brimfield, Munson and Palmer. There was also a direct stagecoach route connecting Springfield and Providence, but the 85-mile trip took 12 hours.

Even in stagecoach days, Boston was a transportation hub, but the trips were a bit more arduous than today. Travelers to Concord, NH could make the 68-mile trip on a stagecoach in 10 hours.

Stagecoach trips from Albany, NY to Manchester, VT, a distance of 63 miles, also took 10 hours, and the fare was $3.25, which was the equivalent of almost 10 days wages for a female mill worker, or a week's pay for a farm hand. The 55-mile trip from Portland to Augusta, ME took 12 hours by stagecoach.

Old Sturbridge Village celebrates New England life in the 1830s and is open year round. Beginning April 19 the museum extends its hours to 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. seven days a week. Admission: $20; seniors $18; children 3-17, $6; children under 3, free. For details on all programs listed: www.osv.org or call 800-SEE-1830.