The Nakasendo was one of five official routes established by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1602 to knit together a newly unified Japan. While the coastal Tokaido road was faster, it required treacherous river crossings. The Nakasendo chose mountains instead of water, threading through the volcanic spine of central Honshu. Magome occupied one of its most demanding stretches, where the road between Mino and Shinano provinces climbed an 800-meter mountain pass before descending to the neighboring station of Tsumago-juku. The village appears in records as early as 1215, during the Kamakura period, when the warrior Minamoto no Yoritomo granted the surrounding estate to Kikuhime, half-sister of the general Minamoto no Yoshinaka. By the Edo period, Magome had become an essential waypoint on the sankin-kotai route, the enforced system requiring feudal lords to travel regularly between their domains and the shogun's capital.

When the Chuo Main Line railway arrived in the late nineteenth century, it bypassed Magome entirely. The village that had thrived on foot traffic for centuries suddenly had no reason to exist. Poverty set in. Fires in 1895 and 1915 destroyed many of the old wooden buildings, and what remained slowly decayed. For decades, Magome was a forgotten place. Then, beginning in the late twentieth century, a careful restoration effort brought the post town back to life. The central street was rebuilt to evoke its Edo-period appearance, with a row of dark-timbered houses climbing the hillside slope. The lower end of town opens onto fields, while the upper end commands panoramic views of the surrounding mountains, including the 2,191-meter peak of Mount Ena. Shops sell senbei rice crackers and hand-ground soba noodles. Old water mills turn beside the lane. The effect is not a museum piece but a living village that happens to look much as it did two centuries ago.

Magome's most famous son never really left. Shimazaki Toson, born here in 1872, grew up in one of the town's honjin, the official inns reserved for feudal lords. He went on to become one of the great novelists of modern Japan, but his imagination remained anchored in the Kiso Valley. His masterwork, Before the Dawn, serialized beginning in 1929 and published in full by 1935, is a sweeping chronicle of the Meiji Restoration as experienced by a village headman modeled on Toson's own father. The novel captures the wrenching transition from feudal highway culture to modern rail infrastructure with an intimacy that only a native could achieve. Toson is buried in Magome's small cemetery, and a memorial museum occupies the site of his family home at the south end of town.

A quiet eight-kilometer stretch of the original Nakasendo has been preserved between Magome and its neighbor Tsumago-juku, offering walkers a rare chance to experience the old highway as travelers once did. The path winds through cedar forests, past tumbling waterfalls, and over the mountain pass that once tested the endurance of every merchant and samurai heading east. Utagawa Hiroshige captured this exact passage in his woodblock print series, the Sixty-nine Stations of the Kiso Kaido, completed between 1835 and 1838. His image of Magome shows palanquin bearers on a narrow road wedged between cliff and mountainside, with an oxherd riding past a waterfall and Mount Ena looming as a grey shadow in the distance. The scene is remarkably unchanged. Bus service connects the two towns for those who prefer not to walk, but the trail is gentle enough for most visitors and takes two to three hours at a comfortable pace.