How French King Rock, the boulder in the Connecticut below the bridge, got its name during the French and Indian Wars.
The French King Bridge — that great steel span over the Connecticut at the eastern end of the Trail — has a name, and folks always ask where a name like that comes from, way out here in the Massachusetts woods. Well, it comes from a rock. There's a great gray boulder sitting out in the middle of the Connecticut River right below the bridge, and that stone is called French King Rock.
Go back to the seventeen-hundreds, to the long, ugly wars between the French up in Canada and the English down here, with Native nations fighting on both sides. Those were raiding years — war parties slipping down through these valleys in the dark, and this river was the road they traveled. The story goes that one such party, French soldiers and their Native allies, came down the Connecticut, and one of the Frenchmen looked out at that lone rock standing up out of the current and claimed it — planted a flag on it, some say — in the name of the King of France.
The name stuck to the stone, and centuries later, when they threw this magnificent bridge across the gorge, the name climbed up out of the water and onto the bridge. So every time you cross it, you're tipping your hat to a French soldier who, three hundred years ago, floated past a rock in the dark and gave it a king's name. The wars are long over. The rock's still there. Go on and wave to it.
Photo: Parkerjh · CC BY-SA 4.0
