CHAPTER XI. 



" AN HIGHWAY SHALL BE THERE, AND A WAY. 



DURING the period which preceded and followed the 

 gaining of precinct rights, much attention was 

 given to the highways. Public thoroughfares are the 

 arteries and veins for the circulation of any community, 

 and not a little of a town's prosperity depends upon its 

 roads. 



It was the misfortune of early Cohasset settlers to have 

 the most wretched roads imaginable for a place neither 

 mountainous nor swampy. Indeed, however, both hills 



and swamps of puny di- 

 mensions were here, and 

 compelled almost any 

 highway through the town 

 to twist itself into innu- 

 merable kinks. Besides 

 this, the ledges of gran- 

 ite with unscrupulous ef- 

 frontery crowded men into narrow places ; the countless 

 bowlders too large to be dug out stubbornly jogged either 

 one wheel or the other ; and the clay hills, moreover, 

 which the glacier packed so hard, held the rain in pockets 

 where sticky mud would form every spring and fall, to mire 

 the oxen and carts. Every foot of our present smooth 

 roads represents a vast expenditure of labor to overcome 

 our naturally bad road conditions. 



In a previous chapter we noted that the Fisher plan 

 reserved certain straight strips for future highways, and 

 a broad fringe along the water's edge or between the 

 marshes and uplands for public ways. But there is a 

 great difference between highways laid out on a map 



The PioNKKR's CtiARior. 



