HistoricSiteMarkers
Colonial America

Boston Milestone — 21 Miles (1768)

Framingham, Middlesex County, Massachusetts

Marker Inscription

21 Miles BOSTON 1768

The Story

This weathered stone is a colonial milestone, one of the road markers set along New England's post roads in 1768 to tell travelers exactly how far they had to go — here, 21 miles to Boston. In an era before numbered highways or reliable maps, such milestones guided riders, stagecoaches, and the post as they made their way between towns, and they helped standardize the routes that knit the Massachusetts countryside to its busy port capital. Cut just a few years before the Revolution, this marker stood along a road that would soon carry news, militia, and rebellion.

Why it matters

Colonial milestones are among the oldest surviving pieces of America's public infrastructure, quiet reminders of how a young country measured distance, moved information, and tied scattered communities together on the eve of independence.

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In colonial and early New England, neighboring towns marked their shared borders with plain lettered stones exactly like this one — a "B" facing Bolton on one face, an "S" facing Stow on the other. Such markers fixed where one town's authority ended and the next began, a line that governed tax rolls, road upkeep, and militia musters. Bolton and Stow are both old central-Massachusetts towns, and under long-standing Massachusetts law their shared bounds were walked and re-marked every few years by town "perambulators" charged with keeping the border honest.

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