Jigsaw for May 17, 2026: Capt. Alden Partridge at the original Norwich, Vermont campus, the North and South Barracks behind him. The painting hangs in the Norwich University Library.
If you live in Norwich, you know the name Alden Partridge. He founded the school that became Norwich University, and on its own that would be enough for one historical marker. But the more you read, the more Partridge there is. He had been superintendent of West Point. He served in the Vermont legislature. He spent his life arguing that a free republic should be defended by trained citizens rather than a standing professional army. To borrow Whitman’s line, the man contained multitudes.
Today I want to talk about just one of them: Partridge the walker.
His reputation as a pedestrian was prodigious, and I will admit I never quite appreciated it until I watched the recent Ken Burns documentary on the American Revolution.
What stayed with me was not just the battles. It was also the walking: the sheer distances ordinary people covered on foot, because before the railroads that was simply how you got anywhere. Partridge took that everyday skill and pushed it to an extreme. For instance:
He walked the 110 miles from Norwich to Williamstown, Massachusetts, climbed Mount Greylock, and walked home again. The whole 220-mile round trip took four days.
In his mid-forties, he made the round trip to the summit of Mount Monadnock and back: 152 miles in three days.
On another outing he covered 300 miles round trip, finishing with a 64-mile push on the final day.
He once led a corps of pack-laden cadets from Norwich to Manchester and back, more than 150 miles, covering 45 miles on one of the days. Teenage boys, on foot, keeping his pace.
As I said: multitudes. This won’t be the last we hear of Alden Partridge. There is a great deal more about him than I ever realized.
Thanks for reading!
Cameron Cross