'Mud Belly deep to my horse' said the weary Rev. Nathan Perkins in 1789, as he traveled by horseback on a religious mission from Hartford, Connecticut, through Vermont. 'Ye innumerable high mountains 3 & 4 miles up them, 1 1/2 perpendicular, covered with snow now three feet in depth…got lost twice in ye woods already heard ye horrible howling if ye wolves.'

"By 1840 traveling conditions through Vermont were better than the wretched Rev. Perkins found them, but still slow-moving and arduous. While towns were being settled, the blazed trails, the narrow paths through the woods and rough oxcart roads were adequate for the pioneers who were much too occupied clearing land and starting their farms to do much traveling. Later Paine's Turnpike and the Winooski Turnpike made stagecoach travel from Boston to Montreal through Northfield possible but still bone-weary over rutted and rough roads, many times filled with stumps and rocks. It took days to go from Northfield to Boston or New York. Such a trip often involved runaway horses, breakdowns on lonely roads, long waits for stages to arrive, and miserable accommodations in inns which were usually someone's roughly constructed house, furnished with poor beds and riddled with fleas. Stagecoach travel in the early 1800's was truly rugged, romantic as it may seem today.

"All over the eastern part of the country during this time the cry went out for better, faster transportation. At first travel by river seemed to offer the answer. Then the wondrous Erie Canal opened in 1825 and brought about a whole new way of travel to thousands who crossed New York State by barge bound for Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and other points west. Although unsanitary, crowded, and rife with bedbugs, the horse-towed barge offered cheap and reasonably secure transportation. Goods, and emigrants hoping to make their fortune, poured out of Vermont and the rest of New England.

"The invention of the steamboat offered Vermont possibilities for even faster transportation. Goods could be carried across Lake Champlain into New York State and then to the Middle West if one could only get them to the lake quickly and easily. Now, Vermont, like the rest of the country, was seized with canal fever. Thanks to the state's numerous rivers, canals seemed entirely feasible.

"All sorts of schemes were proposed to open up the state in order to ship goods from one place to another within the state as well as to points outside. On the eastern border the Connecticut River was made navigable for flat boats as far north as the mouth of the White River.

"In 1825 delegates from Chittenden, Washington, Orange and Caledonia Counties met at Montpelier to consider opening water communication between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River. Surveys were made of routes from Montpelier via the White and Wells Rivers, also from Montpelier to the present height of land at Roxbury and from Lake Champlain to Montpelier. The Onion River Navigation and Tow Path Company was incorporated with five choices of a route from the Connecticut River to Montpelier. A route from White River climbing the Third Branch (Roxbury to Randolph) would require a long flight of locks to boost the canal up from Bethel over Roxbury Flat with a rise of 1,000 feet to the Dog River, and then lock down to Montpelier, a drop of 522 feet. The route through Cabot Township for an elevation of 1,400 feet at Kettle Pond was chosen, and involved a long series of locks in the Winooski River. This plan, among others, was finally abandoned as impractical, but it is of particular interest as far as Northfield's history is concerned to learn that a canal as far as Northfield - locks and all - was once seriously considered. The surveys for the canal were put to good use when the railroad was in the planning stage.

"The canal fever died down when a new means of transportation came into being, for about this same time England had developed a primitive but workable steam locomotive. The railroad soon found its way to this country and was quickly adapted to their needs by American geniuses.

There was a great deal of opposition to the idea of a railroad through Vermont. "Railroads were still in their infancy and the idea of whizzing through the countryside at ten miles an hour was exciting to some but terrifying to others.

"Sparks from engines would set fires, even to the wool on the backs of sheep. Hens would be so frightened they would not lay eggs. Pregnant women would be frightened into miscarriages. People could not breathe going through the air so rapidly, and so on.

"Stage coach and turnpike owners, horse owners and breeders, stablemen, wagon and harness makers saw themselves ruined and were bitterly opposed to a railroad. Thousands of horses would be out of jobs, they said, and have to be shot for it would not pay to feed them.

To be continued: Northfield as the headquarters of the Central Vermont Railway.