Rising From The Mud, Newtown Roads

Have Always Been A Source Of Complaints

By Jan Howard

Roads. We love them and we hate them.

We complain about them because there is construction or reconstruction that slows traffic down, potholes that ruin tires, snowplowing or sanding that takes place after we have to be at work. And all this maintenance takes its toll in the form of property taxes.

Even in the worse case scenario, however, more often than not problems on the roads are fixed in a somewhat timely fashion — depending, of course, on what is considered timely.

If you lived in Sandy Hook in 1834, when residents requested a highway to connect with the Bridgeport-Newtown Turnpike, now Route 25, below South Center District, patience must have been a prized virtue. After various attempts over a period of several years, the road was never constructed.

Most of Connecticut’s roads were muddy paths that connected major towns. The roads were muddy and impassable during the spring thaws and many were unplowed in winter.

A program sponsored by the Grange in the mid 1930s, aptly named “Get Connecticut Out of the Mud,” had as its goal getting town and state roads paved.

It followed an earlier campaign by the Good Roads Association in the early 1900s. In March 1913 the Good Roads Association backed legislation in Connecticut that called for a $5 million bond to build 375 miles of concrete roads over six trunk lines. Concrete was projected to outlast macadam roads but would cost about twice the $12,000 a mile for macadam.

Trunk lines were numbered but there were no route numbers on highways until 1922. Route 3, for instance, ran from the state line in Mill Plain, Danbury, to Newtown, near Hawleyville, and on to Meriden.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Newtown began to pave its secondary roads, according to Town Historian Dan Cruson’s Place Names, Road Names and Other Forgotten Names in a Historical Society Rooster’s Crow; the state had already paved the main roads.

Prior to the advent of mechanized snowplows, shoveling was the method to clear a path on local roads. In the 1920s, clearing the state highway after a heavy snowfall was done by men with shovels. In the 1800s, men worked out their road tax with teams and shovels.

In 1910 a road grader had to be used frequently to refinish the dirt-and-gravel surface of Main Street, known then as Newtown Street, which in comparison to other roads in town was exceptionally wide, just as it was laid out in 1708.

The Newtown Bee was filled with complaints about Newtown Street’s condition, especially in the spring, when heavy rains eroded its surface and turned the shoulders of the road into quagmires.

Finally in 1928, concrete was poured onto a base of gravel, fixing Newtown Street’s continuously poor condition.

The roads in general were poor in town. On July 15, 1904, The Bee reported, “One of our taxpayers, who lives in one of the outlying districts of the town, thinks some of our roads are a little rough. The other day he drove to town with his little one, taking a bottle of milk in case the little one became hungry. But the milk was not used and when he got home, he found a nice lump of butter in the bottle.”

The original town plan for the village of Newtown in 1708 consisted of a main street, 132 feet wide, running north and south. This main street was intersected by two highways, the Northerly Cross Highway, now known as Castle Hill Road, West Street and Church Hill Road, and the Southerly Cross Highway, now Glover Avenue and Sugar Street. Some of the early roads, such as Main Street, followed trails established by Native Americans.

The first reference to constructing a highway from what is now Main Street to Sandy Hook was in November 1715. A committee comprised of Thomas Bennitt, John Glover, and Ebenezer Booth was appointed to oversee layout of the highway.

The road was “two miles from ye middle of ye town down by ye north side of ye old farm over Pohtatuck Brook and so toward ye single pine to a bunch of stones upon a rock which is two miles.”

In laying the road, it was necessary to remove Daniel Foote’s southwestern corner of his four-acre lot northwest by six rods. The committee noted, “We gave him seven rods at his east corner. Said Foote was present and consented to same.”

In 1834 there was a complaint to the County Court of Fairfield County by taxpayers in the eastern and southeastern part of Newtown about the condition of the highway from the Newtown church to Zoar Bridge (Ragged Corner Road). According to the complaint, the road was unsafe for carriages or wagons to pass over.

Sheriff A.D. Baldwin wrote the Newtown selectmen requesting that the road be put “in good and safe repair without delay and spare me the disagreeable necessity of bringing the subject before the County Court.”

The complaint, which was signed by 20 persons, said the road had been “much neglected.”

Also in 1834, a town meeting addressed a highway from Sandy Hook that would connect with the Bridgeport-Newtown Turnpike in South Center District. While taxpayers voted to have the selectmen report back at an adjourned town meeting on December 22, 1834, the proposed highway was not constructed.

Further efforts to connect Sandy Hook with the Bridgeport Turnpike below the village of Newtown continued, despite the abandonment of the plan in 1834. In 1837, another special town meeting was called for the same purpose. However, that meeting never took place.

As a result, 20 indignant taxpayers circulated a petition dated November 5, 1838, regarding the existing road from the church to Sandy Hook, as follows: “To James B. Fairman, Abijah Merritt and Isreal A. Beardsley, the honorable selectmen of the Town of Newtown, We, the petitioners resident electors of the Town of Newtown represent to your body that whereas the road known as the road running from the bridge situated at Sandy Hook to the Episcopal church, situated in Newtown Center is entirely out of repair, dangerous to travel and ridiculously inconvenient to a very large proportion of the inhabitants of said town. We therefore, petition your body to call a meeting to take into consideration the necessity and expediency of repairing said road, or laying out a new road on or near the line of said road, and we further petition that said meeting be called within two weeks from date of this petition or as soon as legal.”

In response, the selectmen called a special town meeting on November 28, 1838, to consider repairing of the old road from Trinity Church to the Sandy Hook bridge or for laying out a new road at the same location. At that meeting, the selectmen were ordered to repair the road, and no new layout of the road was considered. Opposition was so strong to build a new highway that no further effort was made to do so.

The need for an outlet from Sandy Hook to the Newtown-Bridgeport Turnpike below Newtown village surfaced again in 1872. On January 27, a petition asked for a special town meeting to consider the construction of the road. At that meeting, the selectmen were instructed to survey and establish the cost of the road. At an adjourned town meeting the selectmen were instructed to layout and construct a new highway.

Excitement apparently ran high, but the project passed by only three votes, 129 to 126. This led to another special meeting on February 17, 1872, where there was a motion by Dr Erastus Erwin to rescind the previous vote. There were 381 ballots, with 186 voting yes and 195 voting no. The motion was lost.

On May 25, 1872, another special meeting addressed laying out a highway over practically the same route, to run under the Housatonic railroad and terminating on the old highway. A vote passed without discussion and the meeting adjourned without a date.

Attention was again turned to improvement of the Middle Turnpike from Newtown to Sandy Hook. On May 10, 1872, a town meeting voted that the road from Sandy Hook bridge to Newtown Street be graded and graveled, and a committee of three, William Dick, Jabez Botsford, and Henry Wheeler, were appointed to contract and supervise the work at a cost not to exceed $3,000.

A special meeting on August 23, 1833, voted an additional tax of one mill to defray part of the cost.

In the mid 1870s there was another wave of dissatisfaction about the road from Newtown Street to Sandy Hook. In 1874, a town meeting again addressed the Sandy Hook to Bridgeport Turnpike issue, but it was never constructed.

Finally, in March 1890, after continued complaints about the condition of what is now Church Hill Road, a town meeting voted to authorize a committee of five to spend a sum not to exceed $4,000 to macadamize the road from Newtown Street to the Newtown depot of the Housatonic Railroad. The road was not to be less than 12 feet wide.

They also voted not to exceed $500 in gravelling and macadamizing the road from the depot to the Sandy Hook bridge. The three selectmen plus L.B. Booth and D.G. Beers were named to that committee.

The most drastic part of the work was cutting down and grading Church Hill Road. From the summit of the hill and for about one-half its length, a cut was made averaging from four to five feet, with the deepest about seven feet. The bed was laid out 26 feet in width.

Cobble gutters for surface drainage extended half the length of the hill, carrying water into catch basins. The road was crowned with gravel to a depth of ten inches and rolled by a steamroller, then topped by several hundred tons of crushed rock, which was also rolled.

Information for this story was found in Town Historian Dan Cruson’s book Newtown 1900–1960, and Newtown’s History & Historian, prepared by Jane Eliza Johnson.