Cradock Bridge

Quincy, MA

This is an old stone milestone — one of the carved guideposts that once lined the post roads radiating out of Boston, telling travelers on horseback and in stagecoaches exactly how far they had to go. Reading the distances to Boston and all the way south to Plymouth, and pointing the way over the South Boston Bridge, it belongs to the era when New England's roads were first being measured and marked, a practice famously encouraged in the 1700s to regularize colonial travel and mail. Standing in Quincy, it marked a stretch of the vital route linking Boston with the Old Colony towns to the south.

Salem, MA

In the last decades of the 18th century, Salem was one of the busiest and wealthiest seaports in the new United States, its wharves thick with vessels bound for the West Indies, Europe, and the fabled ports of the East. A resident like Ichabod Glover — remembered here as both a chairmaker and a mariner — embodied the town's double life, plying a skilled craft on land while the sea offered the real fortunes. This plaque marks the house built for him by 1799, one of the many surviving Federal-era homes that give Salem its historic character.

Framingham, MA

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.

Lowell, MA · est. 1978

Lowell harnessed the Merrimack's drop through a network of power canals to run the nation's first integrated cotton mills. Its young women workers — the 'Lowell mill girls' — wrote the first chapters of American labor history.