WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — Longtime Fairview Terrace resident Harold Nielsen can’t quite recall the last time he walked down the unofficial trail between the driveable end of his street and downtown White River Junction.
Now in his early 90s, Nielsen walked the so-called Carriage Path almost daily during the several decades he worked on Cadillacs and Chevrolets at the Miller Auto dealership on Gates Street. There, Nielsen recalled last week, he learned that the dealership’s co-founder Herb Miller wanted a shortcut from his home on Fairview Terrace to the Excelsior Carriage Company on North Main Street, where Miller’s father, Henry, sold and repaired horse-drawn conveyances.
“This was before the automobiles came in,” Nielsen said in his kitchen, before pointing toward the upper trailhead and adding. “Herb built a road over there.”
More than a century after Herb and brother Garfield “Dusty” Miller switched the family business to a showroom and repair shop for horseless carriages, the trail remains a traffic-free foot route to downtown for people living along Fairview and other streets designated as terraces.
Free of vehicle traffic, but not of controversy, especially over the last several years.
During construction in 2017 and 2018 of The Village at White River Junction — the senior-living facility that now owns most of the land the Carriage Path traverses — the developers closed the trail to pedestrians so that construction vehicles could reach the back of the property. At the time, co-developer Brooke Ciardelli told the Valley News that “because of the public desire to maintain the path for public benefit, it’ll be reopened in its original state once we’re finished.”
While regular commuters such as Hotel Coolidge owner David Briggs and his wife Peggy Adams, who live on Hillcrest Terrace, are enjoying the re-opened result — “Peggy and I use the paths several times a week, and find (the Carriage Path) at least as good as ever,” Briggs, 73, said on Thursday — other neighbors are countering with thumbs-down reviews.
“I don’t even attempt to go down there by myself anymore,” said Nielsen’s wife, Barbara, 83, “even with a walking stick.”
With her stick — and accompanied by Fairview Terrace neighbors and fellow octogenarians Dave and Christine Davison and a Valley News reporter — Barbara Nielsen did navigate the path, down and then up, with a minimum of struggle on Wednesday afternoon.
But she and the Davisons remained skeptical about the long-term passability of the path, since the developers installed eight strips of railbed-size stones across the path — designed to steer rain runoff away from the footway — and narrowed the trail over the final 20 or so yards to its terminus at the rear of The Village complex and of the neighboring Northern Stage, which now stands at the old Miller Auto site.
“I’ve used (the Carriage Path) for 25 years on a regular basis,” Christine Davison said. “It had been so helpful to have it there since I developed Parkinson’s. My right leg tends to cramp up, so it’s not safe for me to drive anymore. Having a safe place to walk right from home has become more important. With this condition, it’s absolutely important for your health to be active and moving. If you don’t move, it’s the end.
“Having the road gave me an incentive to keep walking.”
Dave Davison, who moved to the Upper Valley 10 years ago, said that he relies on the path partly as a way to get exercise for his own chronic condition — pulmonary hypertension — and partly as a way to avoid driving downtown to shop, to dine, to catch the Amtrak train and to volunteer at Northern Stage, all without needing to drive.
“This is really a resource for this (Terraces) historic district,” Dave Davison said. “It’s a resource for the whole community.”
Davison is the most recent neighborhood resident to make that case to the town of Hartford. In 2013, the Selectboard refused to take official ownership of the Carriage Path and of the other, less developed trails leading from the terraces, citing the cost of maintaining them.
Further complicating the issue is the town’s recent struggles to make driveable the crumbling, 400-foot-long upper section of Gates Street, which ends at Fairview Terrace. Citing the condition of a retaining wall along that steep stretch, the town temporarily closed that stretch of Gates to all cars in December 2017. Since the fall of 2018, it has been divided between a downhill-only lane for vehicle traffic and a pedestrian walkway.
“We think the town’s stodgy approach to the one-way is irresponsible and unreceptive to citizen input,” Briggs said. “This 150-year-old thoroughfare deserves to remain open and, if not, subjected to an exhaustive study to explain why not.”
If the town closes Gates to vehicles again in the future because of the safety concerns, Dave Davison said, “I’m apprehensive that we’re going to be cut off and stranded.”
For The Village’s part, Ciardelli said that the developers have worked with the town and gone beyond the call of community duty to make the Carriage Path accessible to the most people practical.
“The idea of ‘original state’ has been interpreted as ‘every leaf and every single piece of gravel will be put back into place,” she said. “Basically, (opening the trail) is a right to trespass, not an obligation for us to create something.”
Ciardelli also pointed to the examples of the Briggses and other neighborhood residents who have praised the state of the trail.
“When you look at the whole spectrum of society,” Ciardelli said, “the path is getting great use.”
At the younger end of the spectrum, Hartford native and Wilder resident Jes Raymond looks forward to trying the Carriage Path and connecting trails with her husband and fellow roots musician Jakob Breitbach and their 2-year-old son Barrett.
“I used that trail as a kid, but I haven’t been on it in a long time,” said Raymond, who returned to the Upper Valley from Seattle in 2015, “I’m happy to hear it’s open. If there is one really big difference between living on the West Coast and living back here, it is just not very walkable here. It’s unsafe to walk to most services.
“I love the idea of more paths to connect the residential areas to places people want to go.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.