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A walk to remember. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Lebe.

And this is Ghost Town. The mid-1850s was a tumultuous time in American history.

Conflict over slavery was intensifying, leading to what would become the Civil War.

Meanwhile, settlers were rapidly accelerating westward in a historic expansion that would also

shape the course of history itself. But amongst the tension, the movement, the ambiguity,

the emotion was a man, a man clad in 60 pounds of thick leather, tanned himself by the sun and walking,

always walking, between New York City

and Hartford. As a piece in the New York Times would later say, quote, the word strange hardly

captures his strangeness. He was rough and hairy and he wandered around on back roads,

sleeping in caves. Above all, he refused to explain himself. Where did he come from? Where was he

going? Nobody knew, but many would hypothesize about a controversial, unknown man turned legend,

turned larger-than-life urban myth. Today on Ghost Town, let me introduce you to the Connecticut Leatherman. Though the

Connecticut Leatherman was known for many things that we will get into very soon, what struck me first was

his route. The 365-mile loop he would make every five weeks for over 30 years. From 1857 to 1889, the Connecticut Leatherman

would take the same iconic circuit through the northeastern United States. It was a 34-day-long

clockwise trip through southwestern Connecticut and adjacent sections of Lower New York State.

...