Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 4/28/2021
EAST OTIS – Local historian Thomas Ragusa has spent the last 12 years recreating a 30-mile survey of the Knox Trail, eight miles of which he has documented through Otis and Sandisfield. The original survey was done by patriot Nathaniel Austin of Sheffield in 1764.
Ragusa, who retired after 42 years from the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR), said he has found quite a few sites of difference. He has also found quite a few monuments from the survey. “I’m not marking it at all, but I am recording it with the Massachusetts Historical Commission,” he said.
Ragusa, a member of the Otis Historical Association, said they have submitted Form A, a historical description and narrative for a National Historic Place designation that runs the eight miles of the trail they completed, from Station number 1 on the Blandford line to West Otis, Route 23.
“Most people think that when you visit the Knox Trail monuments, you go from Monterey to East Otis, to Blandford. That’s not the actual path; the path is in the woods,” Ragusa said, adding that DCR owns 90 percent of the land that it runs through.
“There are a few spots that are private, that the public has a right to pass, it is written in their deeds,” he said. In Otis, the private property goes up to the trail, while in Sandisfield, private property runs through the trail, but their deeds state that the public has a right to pass.
“I live on the Knox Trail, I’m one of the abutters, too,” Ragusa said. He’s been working on the actual survey since 2009.
The Knox Trail is best known as a military road that played a crucial role in the Revolutionary War in 1775-76. Then Col. Henry Knox, who was 25 at the time, was asked by General George Washington to confiscate captured cannons from the British at Fort Ticonderoga and to bring them to his camp outside Boston. Knox had to gather his contingent, which included his brother William, in Boston, then travel to Fort Ticonderoga and back to Boston with the many tons of cannons, mortars and two howitzers.
When the British in their boats saw all the guns at Dorchester Heights, they decided not to engage. It was a turning point in the war, Ragusa said. At the time, the Knox Trail was called “Ye Trodden Path.”
“There were at least 28 names of the road over the last 250 years,” he said, calling it the “18th century Mass Pike.”
2026 will mark the 250th anniversary of the Knox Trail, a celebration already being planned. “They’re going to recreate the Knox trek,” Ragusa said. The 250th celebration is being chaired by Robert J. Allison at Suffolk University in Boston.
Meanwhile, Ragusa is continuing to survey the trail in West Otis and do his part. He is also continuing to make new discoveries along the way. Originally a native trail, he said in the past couple of months they have found what they believe to be native rock piles and a praying area, and possibly burial grounds nearby.
“We’re looking into it,” he said.