Old Roadster

WINSLOW R. HATCH '3O is writing a book called Old Roads and New Insights. The roads are important to him, but the insights immeasurably more so.

Behind the manuscript-in-the-making lies a Bicentennial story, a story about local history and community pride, about retired people and the quality of their lives, about natural history and environmental protection. But, above all, there's a story about involvement. At their common fulcrum stands Hatch, a retired botany professor and academic dean and former director of research and development for the U.S. Office of Education.

The catalyst is what he calls "The Pimmit Legacy," the rich historical heritage of the area in northern Virginia through which the lower Pimmit Run flows to join the Potomac River at Little Falls. It is countryside where Indians traded tobacco with Captain John Smith in 1608, which George Washington surveyed and traversed to inspect the Patowmack Company's canal locks at Great Falls, where the President and Dolley Madison found refuge from the burning capital and state papers were hidden in 1814, where troops from North and South were bivouacked during the Civil War.

"Old roads," says Hatch, "are the skeleton around which history is built" - hence appropriate avenues for reconstructing the events of those dramatic intervals in America's past. To trace them, to document them for posterity before bulldozer and paving machine obliterate the evidence - to preserve them where possible - has become close to a crusade for Hatch.

His lave affair with local history began shortly after he left the deanship of the College of General Education at Boston University to join the Office of Education in 1957, the year the Hatches bought Benvenue, a magnificent 200-year-old stone house in McLean, Virginia. Benvenue had served as a hospital for Vermont regiments during the Givil War, and the white frame "nurses' house" still stands in the dooryard. But the Pimmit project started in earnest only a few years ago, after a heart attack forced Hatch into early retirement. His fascination with old roads originated, oddly, with an oriole nesting in a towering sycamore tree that shades Benvenue's terrace. As he gamed strength, Hatch took to the woods and by-ways around McLean on bird walks.

It takes a sharp eye to detect the almost imperceptible break in the trees along a winding suburban Washington road that betokens the junction with an ancient path, or the slight depression in the forest floor packed down perhaps three centuries ago and further defined by the erosion of decades of spring rains. But Win Hatch has the observant eye and the incorrigible inquisitiveness of the scientist. He is curious not only about where the long disused road commenced and where it led, but who traveled there - Indians rolling their hogsheads of tobacco toward a rendezvous with traders anchored at the mouth of the Pimmit? Washington riding out to visit Lord Fairfax? Union troops on patrol? - and even, conceivably, what they were thinking about at the time.

In his race with the developers, Hatch has marshalled a small army of volunteers and enlisted the cooperation of the National Park Service and county park authorities which own much of the land under investigation. Over 200 local citizens, from grade school youngsters to the aged, are willing recruits in "the adventure of discovery." Elementary classes learn by doing: scaling old maps, using compasses and transits to plot the course of all-but-forgotten roads, now severed by shopping-center parking lots. A high school teacher for three years spent three days a week at the Library of Congress, poring over Civil War regimental histories. A CIA man has identified the site of a Mathew Brady photograph of Vermont soldiers by the configuration of rocks now part of a suburban yard.

There's something in the Pimmit Legacy for everyone. Sprightlier members of the McLean chapter of the American Association of Retired Persons, of which Hatch is president, tramp the woods, uncovering the ruins of old mills and taverns and bridges; others whose spirit outruns the flesh comb ancient court records and diaries to ferret out who was where when - and why. Seamstresses stitch up new flags to commemorate Civil War regiments stationed in the vicinity. Garden clubs are restoring flowers and shrubs indigenous to the area, and cemetery buffs are refurbishing abandoned graveyards. Lawyers stay the destruction of old roads by uncovering public easements never officially decommissioned. Scout troops have mapped bicycle routes, and park authorities and amateur historians organize walking tours. Some of the most dramatic discoveries remain hidden, however. "I don't want too many signs or notices put up," Hatch says, "because that only tells the hot rodders where they can take those gas buggies of theirs and tear up the landscape."

The project has gained academic recognition as well as community enthusiasm. A student intern from Pennsylvania State University spent one summer assembling the raw data collected by McLean volunteers, and Washington International College offers credit for independent study with Hatch in his "campus without walls."

"Oh, the wealth of the thing," says Hatch exuberantly. "There's so much history around here, you trip over it. Most of it hasn't been discovered before because too many historians stay in their libraries instead of getting out and using their eyes. The panty-waists wouldn't be caught dead walking."

The Pimmit project brings together a number of threads in Win Hatch's life and appeals to several facets of his personality and his philosophy. The scientist in him finds the historical research satisfying in its precision, its concreteness, its readily observable results. The botanist emerges in the marking of old trails: dogwood for Revolutionary era roads; redbud for those of the War of 1812; gray beech for the routes of Confederate soldiers and Vermont maple for Union troops. The educator measures success by the intellectual involvement of his "students" and glories in challenging them to make their own discoveries rather than lecturing to them. The administrator wise in the ways of educational and federal bureaucracy - he once wrote a book, pseudonymously, called Techniques of Mediocrity - revels in the initiative of individual citizens.

Hatch has an unconcealed contempt for people more concerned with the benefits society can bestow than the contributions they can make to it, so the involvement of the community, particularly of his AARP contemporaries, provides a special joy. The program, he points out, "has been led and powered by senior citizens at no cost to the county or state"; its basic thesis is "that if one wants to enhance the quality of life in his community, he does not look to government, but in the mirror, and goes to work with, as it turns out, a great many likeminded neighbors."

"Local history is not the main thing," he reiterates. "It's the involvement - a lot of good people working together." And, he adds with a grin, "we're doing a lot of M.D.s - even psychiatrists - out of a lot of dollars."