Along New Yorks Route 20

Few roads can match Route 20's beauty, history, or contribution to New York's vitality. In 1926, Route 20 became a federal highway and evolved into New York's foremost east-west road. But unlike most early highways, it has survived almost completely intact. The story of Route 20 is told through more than 200 vintage postcards showing scenes from the Shaker communities in Columbia County to the Lake Erie Shore. The postcards show the personality of the road: main streets, the Finger Lakes, and scenic vistas. Not to be forgotten are the tourist courts, hotels, diners, and gas stations that made travel possible.

Route 20 was named a federal highway in 1926, and for the first half of the 20th century, it was Massachusetts's most important east -west road. Extending from Boston's dynamic Kenmore Square to bucolic Hancock Shaker Village on the New York border, the road's history, beauty, and contribution to Massachusetts's vitality were unmatched. Fortunately, almost all of the original road still exists and can be traveled by the modern motorist seeking a nostalgic adventure. In Along Massachusetts's Historic Route 20, more than 200 vintage postcards tell the road's story. Included are scenes along the Boston Post Road and Jacob's Ladder Trail, two of the highway's most historic segments, and also images of main streets, village greens, historic sites, scenic rural vistas, and, of course, the roadside tourist courts, diners, and gas stations that made automobile travel possible.

Gold Medalist, 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Travel-Essay category "I know US 20, I live on it, grew up near it, commute to work on it, and have run on it most mornings for twenty-five years. It has become the Main Street of my life. I am fond of it, and want to tell its very American story." — from the Introduction Whether he's on foot, in a car, or even in a canoe, Mac Nelson will delight readers with his rambling, westward depiction of America as seen from the shoulders of its longest road, US Route 20. As the "0" in its route number indicates, US 20 is a coast-to-coast road, crossing twelve states as it meanders 3,300 miles from Boston, Massachusetts, to Newport, Oregon. Nelson, an experienced "shunpiker," travels west along the Great Road, ruminating on history, literature, scenery, geology, politics, wilderness, the Great Plains, and national parks—whatever the most interesting aspects of a particular region seem to be. Beginning with the great writers and founders of religion in the East who lived and wrote on or near US 20, including Anne Bradstreet, Phyllis Wheatley, and Sylvia Plath, then crossing the plains to the forests, mountains, and deserts of the West, Nelson's journey on this beloved road is personal and idiosyncratic, serious and comic. More than a mile-by-mile guidebook, Twenty West offers a glimpse of a boyish and very American fascination with the road that will entice the traveler in all of us to take the long way home.

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