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The three-century old post road between Boston and New York is largely a memory, but telltale signs remain.

The post road passes through Downtown Crossing into the South End, and then cuts southwestward on a path that has no modern counterpart. The route seems circuitous, but old Boston was a small, swampy peninsula, and the round about route followed solid ground.

The first concrete evidence we can find of the post road's passage out of downtown is in Roxbury, at the corner of Centre and Roxbury streets in Eliot Square. Planted into the sidewalk and against the wall of a car repair shop stands the "Parting Stone," erected in 1744 by Paul Dudley, who, according to Stephen Jenkins's 1913 book, The Old Boston Post Road, was then chief justice of the province. The etched words are still clearly visible. The stone marks the division of the post road into two branches: One takes you toward Cambridge and Watertown on the original post road that goes to Worcester. The other branches south toward Dedham and on to Rhode Island (a later strand that reconnected with the original path at New Haven).

"I'm not sure what that stone is," says Debby Andrade, who works the cash register at Ace's Food Store on that corner and can see the stone across the street. "I think it was part of some kind of station or something. But I know this, it's old. That's into the horse and buggy days."

That the Parting Stone exists at all, sitting quietly and mostly ignored for more than 250 years, is partly the result of one woman's determined sense of preservation. Jenkins reported that at the beginning of the 1900s, a good deal of construction was underway in that area of Roxbury: "A Mrs. Titus, a member of several patriotic societies, passed the spot and saw that the workmen were about to cart the stone away. She gave a man a dollar to sit on the stone and prevent its removal until her return and promised him another if she found him still there when she came back within an hour. Then she traveled to City Hall as quickly as she could ... and came back with the necessary authority to prevent the removal of the stone."

Down Centre Street, the 3-mile stone of the old path toward Worcester has survived, mounted in a huge wall an easy walk from Eliot Square. No direct route still exists to the next marker, also mostly ignored.

"I've walked past it a hundred times and never noticed it," says Roger Willwerth. "Look at that - 1729? Jeez, that's before the Constitution; that's before we were a country!" Willwerth, the assistant property manager at the Mission Park housing complex, is standing on Boston's Huntington Avenue between a cluster of medical institutions and Brookline Village. A trolley passes along the surface tracks in front of the complex.

A long brick wall separates Mission Park from the street. At the turn of the 19th century, that wall separated the world from the House of the Good Shepherd, a home for "wayward girls," as Willwerth puts it. Mounted into that wall at sidewalk level - the brick actually was mortared around a protective concrete casing - sits a stone announcing that we are, by Colonial measure of 1729, standing 4 miles from the center of downtown Boston.

The 5-mile stone can still be found, too, partially obscured by a bush in front of a parking lot of the United Parish Church on Harvard Street in Brookline; the road turned toward the Charles River in Brookline.

The 6-mile stone juts out of the sidewalk in the middle of busy Allston-Brighton, on Harvard Avenue, in front of a True Value hardware store. Its face is about 2 feet from the fenders of parked cars. "I think people notice it sometimes, but they don't know what it's for," says Jason Porter, who until recently worked at the True Value when he wasn't spinning CDs for Allston-Brighton's "free radio" station. "You know what I see it mostly used for? Kids skateboard on it. It's kind of slanted, it's got a good slope to launch off of."

The 8-mile marker is at the old burial ground in Harvard Square. After that, the posts have been uprooted, not to reappear for many miles. Where they crop up again, they were used as the setting for a joke more than a century ago that had anti-immigrant overtones:

Two Irish workmen were standing at one of the posts, which read "30 Miles From Boston."

One nudged the other. "Take off your hat," he said. "We're standing on a grave. Miles is buried here. He was 30 when he died, and he came from Boston."

That would have put them past Waltham and Weston, near Route 20 by Wayland and Sudbury.

Dressed in Colonial garb and tricorn hat, Ralph Sleeper has been greeting guests at the front door of Sudbury's Wayside Inn for four years. For 33 years before that, he wore a different uniform, as a police officer in the nearby town of Hudson.

"The dirt road you see, right here in front of us, that's the old post road. Henry Ford had Route 20 built up there," he says, pointing at the hillside. The new road and the old one, like a couple in a bad relationship, come together, break up, and come together again over the course of many years and many miles.

By some accounts, the inn dates back as far as 1686, certainly to 1716 as Howe's Tavern, and stayed in the Howe family as the Red Horse Tavern until 1861. "It was exactly halfway between Boston and Worcester," explains Shirley Place at the inn's front desk. "It took one day to get here from Boston, and one day from Worcester."

That made the inn convenient and popular in its early days. What made it famous was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn, written in the 1860s, which helped revive a moribund business and caused the new owners to change the name to match the book. But what kept the inn from becoming a memory or subdivision was Henry Ford's intervention. He bought it in 1923 and cobbled together nearly 3,000 acres surrounding the old inn to protect its ambience.

"Take away the electricity, the front is pretty much the same now as it was then," in Colonial days, says Sleeper, although a 1955 fire forced extensive renovations, and rooms have been added in back. Gone is the huge oak tree that Longfellow admired, reputed to have been more than 500 years old when it was felled in the mid-1950s. It was also reputed to have been hollow since the mid-1800s and used as a hiding place for slaves moving up the post road on the underground railroad toward Canada.

Which brings us back to Longfellow's time. The poet traveled the post road with his bride, Frances Appleton, in the 1840s. He traveled it again in 1862 after her death in a tragic fire in their home in Cambridge. "He tried to save her and was badly scarred," says Sleeper. "That's why he wore a big beard for the rest of his life."

Despondent, Longfellow took the suggestion of friends and visited the inn in Sudbury, which for a short time was used more as a summer resort than a working roadside tavern. With good conversation and companionship, he was inspired to write again, creating an epic poem styled in the fashion of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, story after story told by those whose fates and itineraries joined them around the unifying hearth. The first story was offered by the landlord, and its opening lines live in the collective consciousness of the nation: "Listen, my children, and you shall hear, Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere."

Historians know that Revere never did accomplish that long ride - William Dawes did much of the warning. Dawes was born not far from the Parting Stone in Roxbury, and later in his life he worked along the post road near Marlborough.

The taverns of young America were not only the early equivalent of a Motel 6, they also acted as village centers, makeshift courthouses, trading posts, convention halls, marketplaces, post offices, and newsrooms. They sprouted because of the economic opportunity offered by the post road; the most desirable tavern locations were at one of the stone mile markers along the way. And so while the Wayside Inn is perhaps the last working tavern left from the Colonial period, it was by no means unique. There was the Golden Ball in Weston, now a museum, and the Williams Tavern, just a few miles down the road in Marlborough.

The Williams Tavern was built in 1665, burned during Indian warfare in 1676, and rebuilt soon after. It served as the circuit court, and welcomed George Washington and Lafayette, among many others, as guests. Its place in history was just as well-rooted as that of its famous cousin a few miles closer to Boston.

But the Williams Tavern had no poet or protector, no Longfellow or Ford. "It was abandoned and torn down in the 1950s," reports Gary Brown, chairman of Marlborough's historical commission. Brown rues the loss of many historic sites in his town. "Some places pull teeth," he says. "We pull buildings."

And once a piece of the past has been pulled, it is gone forever. Where the Williams Tavern stood is a D'Angelo sub shop. "George Washington didn't eat lunch there," jokes Brown.

Marlborough's loss is much more typical than Sudbury's preservation. Yet even on long stretches where the post road has vanished under a commercial landscape of car dealerships, fast food chains, nondescript office buildings, and sprawling malls, vestiges of history peek out. Sometimes it's obvious and superficial, nothing more than a sign: Post Road Liquors in Post Road Plaza. Often the local name of a stretch of the old post road suggests its importance long ago: Broad Street, State Street, Main Street, the King's Highway, Route 1. Statues of heroes from other eras are poised above the curbs, offering no comment about the changes and incongruous company they now keep. The front steps of upright town halls and imposing courthouses still descend to this street.

Through Worcester, the road becomes sections of Route 9, weaving through the city center. Then the countryside and small towns of Massachusetts reassert themselves - Brookfield, Warren, Palmer. There was a time when Spencer (59 miles from Boston as the road lay) had three taverns to accommodate travelers, with 15 or more coaches often parked in town during lunchtime, according to Stephen Jenkins in The Old Boston Post Road. The taverns and the elms that spread over them are long gone, replaced by a shopping plaza where teenagers hang out on weekends, passing time not far from one of the remaining stone posts.

Connecting the dots of towns, the way mimics creeks and rivers that helped power factories and move goods. Then other means of transportation came to mimic it, bundling the threads of travel, railroad lines that usurped the role of the road in the 1800s, the Massachusetts Turnpike that in turn usurped the railroad in the 20th century. Due west, they all run roughly parallel until the Connecticut River, coursing north to south, creates a natural T. The post road becomes State Street, descending into the heart of Springfield, past the front door of the famous armory that built and stored the nation's weapons beginning in the 1700s.

In 1763, a businessman and Freemason from Brookfield named Joseph Wait erected a handsome "Boston Road" stone in front of the armory. Wait installed the monument because (as legend has it) he had gotten lost in a blinding snowstorm, mistook the Skipmuck Road for the Boston Road, and he almost died. He decided to help fellow travelers avoid that fate.

The stone survived the American Revolution and reportedly was scarred by bullets from the Shays Rebellion, launched by poor farmers protesting high land taxes in 1786. By 1888, the monument had become "one of Springfield's most cherished landmarks," according to a local history of that time. With the armory behind it and the popular Rockingham House tavern in front, it would occupy a central place in Springfield lore and culture through two centuries.

The armory is now a museum, run by the National Park Service. The Rockingham House site is now a Burger King and a bar. The stone disappeared.

Richard Colton, the armory's historian, became intrigued with the stone's whereabouts and began a search last fall. "Good news," Colton reports weeks later. "I found it." Fifteen years ago, local Freemasons located the stone "behind a shed the city owned, covered in debris," he says. They rescued it for safekeeping. It lies in the Masonic Hall's library, across State Street from the armory. The library, Colton reports, has regular visitors' hours.

Down the Connecticut River Valley, the post road drops through New England's version of tobacco country, past Agawam with its giant Six Flags amusement park, through Windsor, Connecticut, beside locks that controlled the water's flow, dipping into Hartford, and on to Middletown, touching Wesleyan University and then running to New Haven and Yale. Here is where the road assumes the route that most people think of as the classic Boston Post Road, Route 1 along the coast.

Connecticut towns "must have been so closely similar that the Colonial traveler who took the Boston stagecoach ... must have been uncertain as to when he arrived, unless he ticked off the places as he passed," wrote Peter Augustus Pindar in 1920 in his pamphlet "The Boston Post Road." "They were as alike as beads on the string of the Boston Post Road - beads of the same pattern and the same color." The beads now are of different sizes, shapes, and colors but still similar enough so that a casual traveler would have a hard time distinguishing one town from another, with their video stores and superstores, traffic lights and parking lots, insurance companies and health clubs. Yet every once in a while something else appears, revealing history and changing use through that long period between Colonial times and the present.

In Norwalk, Connecticut, a neon sign of pink and green, oval with an arrow, lets the world know that The Post Road Diner is always open. "And that's true, 24 hours," says Maria Giapoutzis, who with her brother Teddy, sister Kathy, and sister-in-law Olga have owned and run the diner for four years. The diner was built in 1947 in the Bronx, reports Giapoutzis. It was moved to the site in the 1960s.

If one way to look at the road is in terms of tempo, then the roadside restaurant represents an interesting transition. The early taverns came into existence because the pace of travel demanded overnight rests, creating economic opportunity as people paused for the evening. Today, the speed and ease of movement means that businesses have to hit customers as they run, creating a landscape dotted with fast food outlets, coffee and doughnut shops, banks and video stores with drive-through windows. What The Post Road Diner represents is another era, some 50 years ago, when the car was beginning to dominate but the pace had not yet accelerated, when people were still traveling the post road and still wanted to sit down for a dinner or trade tales over a late-night cup of coffee.

A few miles farther along, into New York, 39-year-old Anthony Simone's life has connected to the old road in a different way. He was born in Italy, arrived here when he was 7 years old, and moved to the Bronx. The post road "is the road I grew up on," he says. When he married, he and his wife moved to New Rochelle - along the post road. Now he is the service manager for Saturn of Larchmont, one of many car dealers in the neighborhood. His work address is 2500 Boston Post Road.

Centuries ago, says Simone, the post road was where people went if their carriage busted an axle, if the leather on their carriage seats needed restitching, or a saddle needed a rivet. Today, car dealers, tire shops, car washes, and auto parts stores dominate the commercial strip. But it's still about keeping people moving.

"Now you stop because your car needs fixing," says Simone, smiling. "Back then, it might have been, 'Hey, put some shoes on those horses.' "

"Back in cp8.81969cp8, it was still called the post road. Well, actually, the city folk called it the Boston road, but the people who lived up here, we called it the post road."

So says Jose Bosch, who was born in Harlem and lives in the Bronx. He is a respiratory therapist who makes house calls.He also is a good Samaritan, willing to stop in heavy Interstate 95 traffic to help a traveler whose car has broken down. And Jose Bosch loves history, so when he hears that the traveler is a reporter working on a story about the old Boston Post Road, he jumps at the chance to become a guide. Bosch's 10-year-old twins, Julian and Jillian, move over to make room for the reporter, the reporter's girlfriend, and his two dogs. Then we take off, to follow the historical paths, twists, and turns.

"Here we are, the Bronx Zoo," Bosch shouts from behind the wheel. "That was built right on the road. Look, see the entrance? See the sign right there? Boston Road. Right by West Farms Square."

Bosch figures that the original route crossed the Harlem River not too far from today's Yankee Stadium, then worked its way down the east side of the Bronx into Harlem. St. Nicholas Avenue, which runs through Harlem to Central Park, closely approximates the oldest route. At St. Nicholas and 163d Street, Bosch passes an unusual sight: There is an elm in Spanish Harlem.

It is a huge, handsome tree, jutting out of a small patch of dirt, arching high over an aging brick housing project. According to Great Trees of New York City, a book recently published by the city's Parks and Recreation Department, this is one of the 105 greatest trees still standing in the city. It was planted in the 1700s, one of many originally lining the Boston Post Road, probably the last tree remaining from that era along the city route.

"Look how nice it is," says Jillian Bosch, "healthy and strong."

There is mention as recently as the mid-1900s of a Colonial-era stone marker in a private yard nearby, at 152d Street, that showed Harlem as 9 miles from Wall Street. A search for the stone brings us across the street from the Dance Theater of Harlem, to an overgrown lot beside an abandoned apartment building. Feral cats scatter as Jose Bosch wades through weeds and broken glass. At the back of the lot is a long, low, makeshift roof topping crumbling concrete walls. "It's a place for the homeless; they built it," Bosch says. "I guess we should go. I don't think we're going to find that stone."

The route of the post road through mid-Manhattan was wiped out in 1811, when the contemporary grid of city streets was laid out, reports Seth Kamil, who runs Big Onion Walking Tours of Manhattan. Kamil, a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, says the road angled from St. Nicholas across the northeast corner of what is now Central Park, down the east side between Third and Fourth avenues, then followed what are now streets called The Bowery and Park Row. In the area known as the Bowery, the road reached the door of John Fowler's Tavern, near the current City Hall. And there it ended, or began.

This was the road that helped New York become the "supreme market center of the world," Kamil says, because it helped the city craft a new philosophy about how to conduct business. Historically, coaches and ships moved when they were full and ready. New York's merchants turned that around. The operating motto, he says, became: "Travel on time, on schedule, no matter what."

In the mid-1800s, one company began to excel at this concept. Created in 1850 by a merger of rival freight deliverers, the company combined the interests of Henry Wells and William Fargo, among others. The company located its corporate headquarters at 10 Wall Street and its horse stables nearby, and one of its first commercial routes was along the old post road, carrying cargo to Boston. Today, its international headquarters remain in Manhattan, the building's high windows overlooking that old post road. The company? American Express.

"Prior to Alex Haley's Roots, in the 1970s, Americans didn't talk much about where they came from," says Kamil. His point extends beyond conversation into preservation; the strong American impulse has been to grow, to build, to make the world over in contemporary terms. If, in general, we didn't talk much about where we came from, it was because we had made it, we were here now, proud to be Americans, ready to celebrate the future more than the past. Part of the celebration has been to build both our lives and our buildings right on top of what was.

Which means it's not surprising that most of the historical construction and artifacts along the Boston Post Road have vanished. Maybe what is surprising, given the remarkable steamroller of American free enterprise, is that anything at all still remains. It does, and where it does, there is a resonance for those willing to stop, a baritone hum rising from long ago through the modern percussion. Stop after stop, the remaining pieces of the old road act like shards of a broken mirror, reflecting a glimpse of where we came from, where we went, what mattered - and what still matters.