Postscripts

HISTORY

The tavern! Originally called an "ordinary," the word gradually fell into disuse. By the end of the 17th century, "tavern" had replaced it as the name for public houses. Not merely a place where food and drink were dispensed, the early American tavern filled many needs, eventually becoming the hub of every community.

Here stagecoaches stopped, linking backwoods settlements with the outside world. Here residents learned the latest news and conducted business transactions. As well as being the community's drinking place, the tavern was its hotel and restaurant. It was also the town hall, assembly room and courtroom. Itinerant actors used its public rooms as a theater. Its bulletin boards posted lists of jurors, announcements of public auctions and legal notices, plus rewards for runaway slaves or bond servants and lost animals or other property. One fact overlooked by historians is that taverns were the seedbeds of the American Revolution, the places where British tyranny was condemned, militias organized and independence plotted. Patriots regarded public houses in front of which liberty poles were erected as the nurseries of freedom. The British called them public nuisances and hotbeds of sedition.

After the Revolution, a large part of the American population was on the move--in stagecoaches and Conestoga wagons, on horseback, and even on foot. Taverns were the hostelries for travelers and boarders, even though the bedding was not changed regularly and strangers might have to double up in the same bed. The first post offices were in taverns, and the tavern keeper often served as the community's postmaster. Delivery of mail to a tavern was informal. Hugh Finlay, who developed colonial postal services in New England, complained, "Letters are thrown down on a table in a Tavern or Coffee House for every man to pick out his own." The law and common practice ("Touch not, nor look upon the Books or Writings of anyone . . .") stipulated that mail was private. But when letters, a relative rarity, lay on a tavern side table for days, some patrons simply could not resist reading them. When no newspapers were included in a mail delivery, letters filled with gossip, news and information inevitably became objects of curiosity. Taverns often served as churches for religious services. Even after a church had been erected, worshipers could be found in the tavern thawing out after long Sunday services in unheated churches or meetinghouses.

Food and drink at taverns were frequently mediocre. Choices were limited, and prices were unpredictable. Food was restricted to locally available farm products. Meat, heavily salted for preservation, was the mainstay of the diet. In the 18th century, drinking was the most popular of tavern recreations. W.J. Rorabaugh, a social historian at Smith College, has calculated that the annual per capita consumption of distilled spirits reached 3.7 gallons by the time of the Revolution. By 1830, thanks to the wide availability of cheap whiskey, annual per capita alcohol consumption climbed to five gallons--nearly triple today's figure. Local courts established prices for alcoholic beverages, with legally required price schedules posted in each licensed tavern. Rum was the most popular distilled liquor; the most expensive varieties were imported from the West Indies, but it also was fermented and distilled locally from molasses imported from the same source.

Rum was the main ingredient of what one writer described as "a very good, pleasant and healthful drink: punch." Punch was made using the rinds and juice of imported lemons, limes and oranges, mixed with rum and sugar. Cheaper fermented beverages were also available. Apple cider was sold by the jug, pint, pot or pitcher. Beer was usually locally brewed. Brandy was made from peaches, apples or cherries. The consumption of wine, largely available only in urban taverns, was limited to the affluent.

Many famous taverns served as stagecoach stops along the post roads.The locations and spacing of taverns along the New York and Albany Post Road in the lower Hudson Valley tell us something about the nature of coach travel in the early days: After leaving Kingsbridge, stagecoach stops in Yonkers included a tavern at the corner of Main Street and Nepperhan Avenue, called Hunt's Tavern after the proprietor, David Hunt. A new tavern built by Jacob Stout replaced it. Successively called the Indian Queen Inn, the Eagle Hotel, the Nappeckamack House and the Stage House, it was moved in 1851 to another location to make way for the Getty House. A Yonkers competitor, Bashford's Tavern, stood some distance from the post road, near the sloop wharf on the Hudson, at the mouth of the Nepperhan (Saw Mill) River. So popular was proprietor John Bashford, stages made a detour to reach his establishment.

In Hastings, the Dyckman homestead, known for a time as Brown's Tavern, still stands. In Dobbs Ferry during the Revolution, Peter Post owned a small stone house used as a tavern. Post's establishment, the haunt of hard drinkers and cock fighters, became such a nuisance it was eventually closed. In Irvington on Route 9 at West Clinton Avenue is the Jan Harmse house, built about 1693 as a tenant farmhouse on the Philipsburg Manor. Sometime before the Revolution, this modest stone dwelling was leased and converted to use as a tavern by Jonathan Odell. In 1785, the Commis- sioners of Forfeiture sold it to Odell, who continued it as a tavern until his death in 1818. After a succession of owners, it later became an estate gatehouse. Also in Irvington, close to the Tarrytown line and adjoining the grounds of "Sunnyside," Washington Irving's home, was the old homestead of the Acker family, a noted tavern and stage stop after the Revolution.

In Tarrytown, at the northwest corner of Main Street and Broadway, stood an old tavern and stage stop operated by Martin Smith and his son, Jacob. While stopping there, Freeman Hunt, founder of Hunt's Merchants Magazine, was berated by the proprietor for returning late to the hotel--at 9 p.m. To add insult to injury, the staff neglected to call him for breakfast in the morning. Hunt checked out immediately. He got even by publishing a letter describing the incident in the magazine American Traveler and later in his 1837 book, Letters About the Hudson River and Its Vicinity. Hunt added that few travelers stopped at Smith's Tavern "without having some difficulty with the ignorant booby who pretends to keep a hotel. Indeed, many travelers go four or five miles out of the way to avoid stopping at this house." Also in Tarrytown, on the east side of Broadway north of Main Street and near the imposing Second Reformed Church, was a stone house built around 1712 by Abraham Martlingh that served as a tavern during the Revolution. According to legend, a cannon ball fired from a British vessel in the Hudson passed through a groundfloor front window and out the door at the back.

Farther north, on Revolutionary Road in Ossining (then part of the Albany Post Road) at the entrance to the locally designated Sparta Historical District, is the so-called Jug Tavern, built about 1760 as a farmhouse on the Philipsburg Manor. Peter Davids, whose family had lived in the house before the Revolution, purchased it from the Commissioners of Forfeiture in 1786. In 1795, his son David applied for a license to sell liquor. By 1820 the building had been sold to Nathaniel Garrison and became known as the Garrison house. About this time, the size of the house was doubled by an addition at the southern end of the original building. Mrs. Garrison continued to occupy the building until her death in 1869. After that the house fell into disrepair; more recently it has been restored.

Ward's Tavern, operated by Major Moses Ward in Ossining (then called Sing Sing) was continued in operation as a tavern after Ward's death by his widow, Nancy. Located on Main Street near the town pump on what was later called Pleasant Square, it became a store in 1845. Holmes's Tavern, stood at the corner of Church Street and Highland Avenue, and later was known as the Union Hotel. A state marker commemorates its site. Whenever the legislature was in session in Albany, as many as four stages, each drawn by a four-horse team, would stop here on a single day. Stage passengers are reported to have been served a meal of chicken potpie, doughnuts and applesauce.

One of the Union Hotel's proprietors was Enoch Crosby, Jr., son of the man on whom James Fenimore Cooper modeled the hero of his Revolutionary War novel, The Spy. Napoleon III, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was among the disting- uished guests who stopped at the Union Hotel. The pretender to the French throne had been exiled to America in 1836 and lived in Bedford. He dined at the Union Hotel on several occasions after a trip by stage from Bedford to Sing Sing to take a boat for New York. Napoleon also visited the infamous prison established to quarry the dolomitic limestone known as "Sing Sing marble." Harsh discipline, the lockstep, the rock pile and the lash were routine there.

Writing in J. Thomas Scharf's 1886 History of Westchester County, Ossining's Dr. George Jackson Fisher mentions that Simeon M. Tompkins, a subsequent proprietor of the Union Hotel, told him of many conversations he had with his famous guest. Unfortunately, Dr. Fisher did not record these exchanges for posterity. Other Sing Sing taverns dating from early in the 19th century included Col. Joseph Hunt's American Hotel, later known as the Weskora Hotel, and the St. Cloud, built by Alexander Graham and also known as the Ossining House. Both served as stage stops at one time.

The stage stop in Croton was the Old Post Road Inn, formerly the McCord residence, a two-story wooden building with a long gallery across the front at the second floor. In the early 20h century, renamed the Drowsy Saint Inn, it was operated by novelist Jane Burr. Its rough stone foundation can still be seen on the north side of Old Post Road North, across from the Holy Name of Mary Church.

Among the first houses erected in Peekskill was a tavern known as the Birdsall House. Popular with American and French officers during the Revolution, Washing- ton and Rochambeau often stopped there, according to legend. It remained a tavern until the 1880's.

Until 1912 , near the Upper Manor House in nearby Van Cortlandtville stood the Gardner Holman house, a tavern for many years and a regular breakfast stop for carriages on the way to New York. Built about 1750 by John Taylor, it was known first as Taylor's Tavern and later as Dusenbury's Tavern. Captured British spy Major John André and his guards breakfasted there on September 25, 1780. André was being taken to Gen. George Washington at the Beverly Robinson House on what is now Route 9D, south of Garrison.

Nineteenth-century American preoccupation with railroad building brought about an outlay of capital that historian Henry Adams deemed sufficient "to bankrupt the world." The railroads that supplanted post roads and stagecoaches, inevitably caused the demise of taverns along the post roads. Other forces also brought about changes in taverns. One of the biggest of these changes was the separation of the bar from the tavern, thus altering its character completely. From the time of the earliest colonial regulations, the two had been inseparable, and no one could sell liquor at retail without making provision for travelers. In the 1830's, some states began to permit taverns to operate without lodging facilities. Another change was the disappearance of the common dining table with its standardized menu and fixed eating hours. Closely associated with this was the abandonment of the so-called American Plan, in which lodging and meals were sold as a package. With the barroom and restaurant severed from the tavern, its character soon became completely different.

A network of post roads once bound distant parts of the country together, making it possible for persons separated by thousands of miles to correspond regularly. Swift stagecoaches had provided the means of moving mail and passengers from place to place. And taverns had provided centers of hospitality, friendliness, news, laughter, and entertainment. For post roads, stagecoaches and taverns, it was a relationship of mutual dependence and benefit.

The workaday post roads are barely discernible now beneath their coverings of asphalt and concrete. Their speeding stagecoaches have all long since vanished. And today's hotels and taverns are but pale imitations of the warm, convivial inns of almost two hundred years ago when a welcome was extended to all. So, to all these shadowy reflections of simpler days when this country was young and full of hope, let us offer an extravagantly sentimental toast--and a fond farewell.

Labels: History, Inns and Taverns, Post Roads

Posted by Notorc @ 10/14/2006 08:21:00 PM