The Starting Line
On the morning of the nineteenth of April, 1924, one hundred and eleven men stood in the road at Hopkinton and waited for the word to run. They had come out from the city and the suburbs and the towns roundabout, lean men in cotton singlets and canvas shoes, and they had been brought to this particular stretch of road for a reason that had nothing to do with the town behind them and everything to do with a measurement. The road they faced ran east toward Boston, twenty-six miles and three hundred and eighty-five yards of it, and somewhere near the start a man named Clarence DeMar carried in his stomach three boiled eggs and in his pocket three more. He had taken them from his own hens that morning in Melrose. He would eat the rest after the gun, and they would be nearly the only thing he ate until he crossed the line in the city hours later, five minutes ahead of the next man and bound, though he did not yet know it, for a bronze medal in Paris that summer.
That morning is why the town's name travels well beyond its own borders. The story of how the town came to be standing in that road is older than the town's part in it, and the town's part began almost by accident, as a matter of arithmetic.
The Boston Marathon had been run since 1897. In that first year, and for twenty-seven years after, the standard distance for a marathon was not today's familiar figure. It was twenty-four and a half miles, a number that traced back to the old legend of the Greek soldier who ran from the plain of Marathon to Athens to carry word that the Persians had been beaten. Pheidippides was his name in the story, and whether he ran or whether the tale grew up around a battle and a death that wanted a runner, the distance attached itself to the idea of a marathon and stayed there for a generation. Twenty-four and a half miles, measured from Metcalf's Mill in Ashland to the finish in Boston, put the start not in Hopkinton but in Ashland, the town next door to the east. For the first twenty-seven runnings of the race, Ashland was the starting town. A Boston Herald man named Tom McCabe wrote of that original course that the roads from Ashland into Boston had no rival, that the hills of Newton and Wellesley resembled the very ground Pheidippides was said to have crossed. Ashland kept the start, and for a long while there was no reason to move it.
The reason, when it came, came from England and from a king.
At the Olympic Games held in London in 1908, the marathon was meant to begin at Windsor Castle so that the royal children might watch the start from the nursery windows. From the castle to the Olympic stadium the distance came to twenty-six miles, and then a further three hundred and eighty-five yards were added on at the far end so that the runners would finish with a lap inside the stadium and come to rest directly in front of the royal box. Twenty-six miles and three hundred and eighty-five yards. It was an arbitrary figure, fixed by the placement of a castle and a viewing box and the geometry of a running track, and it had nothing about it of the sacred or the inevitable. Yet it stuck. The Olympic standard for the marathon became twenty-six point two miles, and it has remained so ever since, a royal whim hardened into a law of the sport.
The next town was Hopkinton.
The town happened to lie at the spot where twenty-six miles and three hundred and eighty-five yards of good road, measured backward from the Boston finish, came to an end. It was chosen the way a surveyor chooses a corner, by the running of a line and the falling of a measurement, and the line fell on Hopkinton. That is how the accident of geography became the town's lasting identity. The same upland that the Nipmuc had hunted and the praying Indians had farmed and the English had cleared and the mills had drained, the high ground that gave the rivers their start, now gave the race its start as well, for the simplest of reasons, which was that it was far enough from Boston.
The men who timed the new course took a certain satisfaction in how the runners handled the added distance. McCabe, the Herald reporter, noted that the nine minutes the field used in covering the extra distance of almost two miles, from the new start to the old point in Ashland, was proof enough that they knew their business. The course had grown by a fifth of an hour's running and the runners had simply absorbed it, the way good runners absorb whatever the road gives them.
Of the hundred and eleven who started that morning, the man who mattered most to the history of the race was Clarence DeMar. He lived in Melrose and set type for a living, a tradesman who ran, and by 1924 he was already a known quantity in Boston. The win that April was his fourth in the race, and he would win it three more times before he was through, seven victories in all, more than any man in the open division has won before or since. The newspapers had taken to calling him Mr. DeMarathon, half in affection and half in awe.
The details of DeMar's day have the homely particularity that the best history keeps. The six eggs from his own hens, eaten before and after the gun. The few blisters on his feet, which he mentioned and then dismissed, having finished five minutes clear of the man behind him and feeling, he said, strong. Along the way the students of Wellesley College had gathered at the roadside to cheer the runners through, an early version of the wall of noise that later runners would come to dread and love in equal measure. He went on to Paris that summer and brought home the bronze, finishing third among the American team he had helped earn its place in the trial that April.
The race came to the town in 1924 and never left. Every spring since, with the gaps that war and weather and one pandemic have forced, the road out of Hopkinton has filled before dawn with runners and the town has emptied its quiet to make room for them. But the race is not the town, and the fullest surviving record of Hopkinton's twentieth century runs through a different kind of source than the chronicles and deeds and vital records and atlases that carry its earlier centuries.
The deeper Hopkinton, the Indigenous ground and the praying town and the colonial parish and the milling village and the mapped town of the eighteen-seventies, comes down through material that has been gathered and catalogued and, in places, read closely. Any New England town within thirty-odd miles of a great city changed a great deal across the twentieth century, and Hopkinton, with its railroad and its reservoir and its road full of runners every April, changed along with the rest, growing as Boston's suburbs pushed west along the roads and rails already described.
One twentieth-century witness does remain among the sources, and it is a witness without words. The United States Geological Survey mapped this country quadrangle by quadrangle across the late nineteenth century and the whole of the twentieth, and Hopkinton sits within the sheets that the survey drew and redrew from 1884 down to 2006. Those maps show the shape of the ground and the works of human hands laid upon it, and they show those things again and again across more than a century, so that one sheet laid beside another reveals the town changing in roads and water and built things drawn to scale.
On those sheets the great visible fact of the modern town is water. The high ground of Hopkinton gives birth to rivers, and in the nineteenth century that water was dammed and gathered to slake the thirst of a growing metropolis downstream. The topographic record carries that change forward into the twentieth century and shows it settling into permanence. The reservoirs that the maps of the eighteen-eighties show taking shape appear on the later sheets as established water, fixed bodies with fixed shores, the Hopkinton and Whitehall waters lying across the town as though they had always been there. A child born in the town in 1900 grew up beside lakes that her grandparents had watched being made. The water stayed, and grew familiar, and became part of the face of the place.
Around the water the maps show the slower changes expected of any New England town in the automobile century. Roads that the nineteenth-century sheets drew as the thin lines of country ways thicken and multiply on the later sheets. The rail line followed earlier through the town holds its place for decades and then, on the latest sheets, may be drawn in the dashed convention that mapmakers use for a way no longer running, the iron taken up, the bed left to grass. New roads appear where there were fields. The pattern of small marks that a topographic map uses to show buildings spreads outward from the old village centers along the roads, thinly at first and then less thinly, the visible signature of a town filling in. The shape of the change is clear on the sheets, a broad outline rather than a street-by-street chronicle.
At the one end there is a single brilliant morning, fully lit, every detail in place, the road and the runners and the eggs and the man from Melrose with the blisters on his feet. At the other end there is the long quiet span of the century itself, the growing town that the maps can show in outline and silhouette but cannot fill with faces or names or voices. The marathon morning is sharp because a great newspaper covered it and a great runner ran it and the whole apparatus of the press fixed it in print. The century around it stays dim by comparison. A town can be famous for a single road on a single morning every year and remain, in its ordinary decades, almost unwritten.
The place has been defined, across every turn of its story, by its height and its water, the upland where the rivers begin, the watershed the Nipmuc walked and the praying town farmed and the colonists cleared and the mills used and the city drank. The marathon came to Hopkinton for precisely that reason of height and distance, because the town stood far enough out along the western roads to make the measurement come right. The same geography that shaped every earlier turn of the town's story shaped this last one too. The runners who gather in the dark each April, whatever they know of the town they stand in, are standing where they stand because of the lay of the land, and the lay of the land is the oldest character in the story. A line on a map, drawn backward from a finish in Boston, happened to end on this high ground, and every April since, the road has filled with runners at first light.