Stage-coach and Tavern Days

by Alice Morse Earle

Wright Tavern, Concord, Massachusetts.

Mrs. Jencks and Lucy climbed the ladder to the loft, opened the single shutter, and let in a narrow dancing ray of dusty sunlight on the crowded desolation within. Lucy pointed between bars and barrels and bags, with slender white finger, at a large and remote box which a slender, strong, copper-colored hand had pointed out to her in her dreams. Her mother sternly sent her below to do her stent at quilt-piecing, and she tearfully and unwillingly descended. It was nearly an hour ere the strong arms of Mrs. Jencks had dislodged and repacked the unutterable chaos to the extent of reaching the box. Clouds of dust dimmed the air. She untied and removed a rotten rope that bound the box, which even in the dim litter looked like the upper half of a coffin. Within lay something swathed in linen bands and strips of old flannel—newspapers were then too precious for wrappings. She struck it, and there came a faint rattle of metal. The thought came to her of the description of a mummy which she had read a few nights before in the almanac. She paused; then twisted in and among the boxes to the head of the ladder. She could hear the sound of Perseverance singing a hymn. Perseverance Abbott was the “help,” the sister of a farmer neighbor, and she was baking “rye and Injun” bread for the teamsters who would stop there at nightfall. Mrs. Jencks called down, “Persy, come here a minute!” “I’ll tell her to come,” piped up the shrill voice of Lucy, who was hovering at the base of the ladder and evidently meant to be “in at the death.” Perseverance appeared, floury and serene, at the foot of the ladder. “I’ll come,” she said, in answer to Mrs. Jencks’s appeal for assistance, “because I know you’re scairt, and I ain’t a-goin’ to see Ben Jencks a-huntin for them Indian bones again. I’ve been dyin’, anyway, to clear this out ever since I come here, an’ this’ll be the beginnin’.” “Persy,” said Mrs. Jencks, hesitatingly, “it seems to be something dead.” “Dead!” answered her hand-maid, “I’ll bet it’s dead after layin’ here forty, perhaps a hundred year!” An atmosphere of good sense and fearlessness seemed to halo her about; still both women unwrapped the heavy thing, the mummy, with care. A bare shining scalp came first to view. “It’s a wig-block,” shouted Perseverance in a moment, “yes, and here’s curling irons and wire wig-springs.”

It was “grandpa’s wig-block,” so Reuben Jencks said, when he saw it later; his grandfather had added to his duties of tavern-keeper, roadmaster, selectman, and deacon, that of wig-maker. And in that day, when all men of any station wore handsome flowing wigs, and all, even poor men, wore wigs of some kind, it was a calling of importance. Moreover, an Indian with a tomahawk cut but a sorry figure when he tried to scalp a man who wore a wig; it was a deriding insult to the warlike customs of the whole Indian race.

Sign-board of
Moses Hill’s Inn.

There is a fine old brick tavern still standing in a New England seaboard town, and now doing service as a rather disreputable road house. It is a building rigidly square, set due north, south, east, and west, with four long, narrow doors opening over broad door-stones to the four ends of the earth. A long tail of summer and winter kitchens, a wash-room, brew-house, smoke-house, wood-rooms, sheds, barns, piggeries, pigeon-houses, hen-houses, once stretched a hundred feet or more adown the road, part of which is now torn down. Each joint of the tail helped loyally in olden times to furnish good cheer to the traveller. The great square rooms of the main house are amply furnished; one was a taproom, and in each second-story room still are two double beds, save in the corner room next the kitchen tail of the house, where stands nailed firmly to the floor of the room a somewhat battered oaken table. A little open staircase in the corner of this room leads down to the working end of the house, and was used in olden days to carry supplies to the upper table from the lower kitchen.

It has been many a year since good cheer was spread on that broad oaken board, though at one time it was the favorite dining place of a choice brotherhood of old salts, called the Mariners’ Club, who gathered there when on shore to tell tales of wild privateering, and of sharp foreign trade, and to plan new and profitable ventures. Many of these Mariners’ Clubs and Marine Societies existed in seaport towns at that golden time in New England’s marine commercial history.

Sign-board of
John Nash’s Tavern.

This room was the scene about seventy-five years ago of a somewhat unusual expression of feminine revolt—that is, both the expression and the revolt were unusual. One of the most constant frequenters of the tavern, the heaviest eater and deepest drinker, the greatest money-spender at these Mariners’ dinners, was one Captain Sam Blood, who ran a large coasting brig, which made but short trips to Atlantic seaports. Thus he was ever on hand for tavern fun. He had a large and rather helpless family which he kept somewhat in retreat on a gloomy farm two miles inland; his mother old and feeble, yet ever hard-working; a large number of untidy children, and, worst of all, a sickly wife, a tall, gaunt woman who whined, and whined, and ever whined from her patch-covered couch, over the frequent desertions of her spouse to the tavern-table, and his wilful waste of money, while she could never leave the house. One night a specially good dinner was set in the Mariners’ room, roast and boiled meats, pies and puddings, a grand array of full pitchers, decanters, and bottles; the assembled group of old salts were about to ascend from the taproom to seat themselves comfortably at the round table for solid work, when a terrible crash and scream were heard, each seeming louder than the other, and before the startled eyes of the landlord and his guests, as they rushed up and into the room, there were all the steaming dishes, all the streaming bottles, with table-cloth and plates in a disorderly hopeless wreck on the floor. “Who could have done it?” “There he goes,” shouted one captain, as he ran to the window; and, surely enough, a slender man in nautical garb was seen striking out from under the sheltering walls of the ell-kitchens and sheds, and running desperately across the snowy fields. Full chase was given and the marauder finally captured; he was swung roughly around with oaths and blows, when sudden silence fell on all. It was Sam Blood’s wife in Sam Blood’s togs. “I’ll settle for this dinner,” said Sam Blood, blackly.