Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

I came to Greenwich (pronounced GREEN-witch), population one thousand, a village built along a broad single lane called “Ye Greate Street” (Ye correctly pronounced as “the”), which ran from a rotting boat landing on the Cohansey River northwest for two miles, most of the way lined with old homes and buildings. In the seventeenth century, “greate street” meant “main street,” but now, “great” in the sense of “grand” was also accurate. Of the nearly hundred homes and buildings along the three-century-old thoroughfare, about ninety percent were built before 1880 and more than a quarter dated from the eighteenth century. Even the Sunoco station was in a 1760 house. Although the old structures appeared sound, only a few had been restored. Greenwich was a Williamsburg with a difference: it wasn’t dug out of the ground and rebuilt. There was another difference too: it didn’t have that unnaturally genteel, sanitized look of the Virginia village that turns it into a museum. Surely, the first Williamsburg must have been a knockabout frontier town, a place of skullduggery and war, where the laundry got hung out and dogs pissed in the muddy lanes, where the scent of dung and wet horses was strong. To resurrect that town and playact the past is a good thing for Williamsburg. But it wasn’t the way of Greenwich. Hidden in the tall marsh grass of the coastal lowland, the whilom seaport that once rivaled Philadelphia was remarkable. I stopped at Arnold’s grocery, post office, and filling st...