King's Highway
Lebanon, Grafton County, New Hampshire
Marker Inscription
King's Highway 1764 Erected by Submitt Wheatley Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution West Lebanon N.N. 1917
The Story
The King's Highway was one of colonial New England's important overland routes, and this stretch was laid out in 1764, on the eve of the American Revolution, as settlers pushed up the Connecticut River valley into the New Hampshire Grants. The Daughters of the American Revolution erected this marker in West Lebanon in 1917 to keep the memory of that early road alive.
Why it matters
Colonial roads like the King's Highway knit scattered frontier settlements into a connected society and set the paths that later towns and highways would follow.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the middle of the eighteenth century, the upper Connecticut River valley was one of New England's advancing frontiers. Settlers were pressing north and west into a rugged, forested country, carving out new towns in the region then known as the New Hampshire Grants — lands whose ownership and governance were still being sorted out.
The year carved on this marker, 1764, places the road's laying-out on the very eve of the American Revolution. The colonies were still nominally loyal to the Crown, and a road named the 'King's Highway' reflected that world — a time when the king's authority was simply the frame within which colonial life was organized.
Settling this valley was slow, demanding work. Families came seeking farmland along the river's fertile bottoms, but reaching those homesteads and staying connected to older settlements downriver required roads hacked through hilly, wooded terrain. A cleared and recognized highway was the difference between isolation and belonging to a wider community.
People & events
The heart of this story is the road itself. Laid out in 1764, this stretch of the King's Highway was one of the arteries that let settlers move up the Connecticut River valley and tie their new homes into the network of colonial New England. Roads like it were the infrastructure of expansion — unglamorous, but essential.
The marker you see was erected much later, in 1917, by the Submitt Wheatley Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in West Lebanon. The DAR made a mission of finding and honoring these older landmarks, and by placing a permanent marker they ensured that a road already more than a century and a half old would not be forgotten as the automobile age arrived.
There's a nice symmetry in that gesture. A road named for a king was preserved by an organization dedicated to the memory of the Revolution that ended royal rule — a reminder that even the artifacts of the colonial past were embraced as part of America's own heritage.
Its place in the American story
Before there was a United States, there were roads — and roads did quiet, indispensable work in making a nation possible. They knit scattered frontier settlements into something larger, allowing goods, news, and people to move between communities that would otherwise have stood alone.
The paths laid out in the colonial era often set the routes that later generations followed. Towns grew up along them, and in many places modern roads still trace the same corridors first cleared by settlers with axes and ox teams. A highway marked in 1764 is, in a real sense, an ancestor of the transportation networks Americans depend on today.
There is also meaning in the road's name and timing. Laid out under the Crown just before the Revolution, the King's Highway captures a hinge moment in American history — the last years of colonial dependence, on the threshold of independence. To follow its memory is to stand at the edge of that great turning.
If you visit
This is a landmark best appreciated with a sense of history rather than spectacle. Standing near the marker in West Lebanon, you can look out over the upper Connecticut River valley and picture the corridor as it once was — a cleared track threading north through frontier country.
Let the two dates work on you. The road was laid out in 1764, under a king, and the marker was placed in 1917, by descendants of the Revolution that followed. Holding both in mind is part of the pleasure: you're looking at a single spot that connects colonial beginnings to a much later act of remembrance.
If you're exploring the Upper Valley, this fits neatly into a day of small-town New Hampshire and Vermont history, where old roads, village greens, and river crossings tell the story of how the region was settled. Come for the sense of continuity — the quiet realization that the way people once traveled still shapes how you move through this valley today.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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