J. R. Humphreys

This is a beautiful book written in 1961 by a college professor traveling and his wife. It’s written almost as poetry with the authors profound sense of time weaving through all of his journeys along the back roads the lost roads in the lost old towns of America even in 1960. Almost a precursor to William Least Heat Moon’s BlueHighways. You can tell the author is looking carefully for the sound of old horse and carriage and is almost willing himself to time travel with every new discovery. He starts in the back roads of colonial New Jersey moving through Amish country of Pennsylvania and the pioneering route of Colonel Braddock then along the Ohio River crisscrossing between Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. He passes through the Amana colonies of Iowa through Kansas and into the old Spanish settlements of Taos in Santa Fe and through Utah and the mining towns of Colorado ending in Monterey California.… (mer)