Stage-coach and Tavern Days

by Alice Morse Earle

Taproom of Wadsworth Inn.

It would be a curious and entertaining study to trace the evolution of our great hotels, from the cheerful taverns and country inns, beloved of all travellers, to more pretentious road houses, to coffee-houses, then to great crowded hotels. We could see the growth of these vast hotels, especially those of summer resorts, and also their decay. In many fashionable watering-places great hotels have been torn down within a few years to furnish space for lawns and grounds around a splendid private residence. Many others are deserted and closed, some flourish in exceptional localities which are in isolated or remote parts of the country, such as southern Florida, the Virginia mountains, etc.; many have been forced to build so-called cottages where families can have a little retirement and privacy between meals, which are still eaten in a vast common dining room. But the average American of means in the Northern states, whose parents never left the city till after the 4th of July, and then spent a few weeks in the middle of the summer in a big hotel at Saratoga, or Niagara Falls, or Far Rockaway, or in the White Mountains, now spends as many months in his own country home. A few extraordinary exceptions in hotel life in America remain prosperous, however, the chief examples on our Eastern coast being at Atlantic City and Old Point Comfort.

The study of tavern history often brings to light much evidence of sad domestic changes. Many a cherished and beautiful home, rich in annals of family prosperity and private hospitality, ended its days as a tavern. Many a stately building of historic note was turned into an inn in its later career. The Indian Queen in Philadelphia had been at various times the home of Sir Richard Penn, the headquarters of General Howe and of General Benedict, the home of Robert Morris and Presidents Washington and Adams. Benjamin Franklin’s home became a tavern; so also did the splendid Bingham mansion, which was built in 1790 by the richest man of his day. Governor Lloyd’s house became the Cross Trees Inn. Boston mansions had the same fate. That historic building—the Province House—served its term as a tavern.

Sometimes an old-time tavern had a special petty charm of its own, some peculiarity of furnishing or fare. One of these was the Fountain Inn of Medford, Massachusetts. It was built in 1725 and soon became vastly frequented. No town could afford a better site for inns than Medford. All the land travel to Boston from Maine, eastern New Hampshire, and northeastern Massachusetts poured along the main road through Medford, which was just distant enough from Boston centre to insure the halting and patronage of every passer-by. The Fountain Inn bustled with constant customers, and I can well believe that all wanderers gladly stopped to board and bait at this hospitable tavern. For I know nothing more attractive, “under the notion of an inn,” than this old tavern must have been, especially through the long summer months. It was a road house and stood close to the country road, so was never quiet; yet it afforded nevertheless a charming and restful retreat for weary and heated wanderers. For on either side of the front dooryard grew vast low-spreading trees, and in their heavy branches platforms were built and little bridges connected tree to tree, and both to the house. Perhaps the happy memories of hours and days of my childhood spent in a like tree nest built in an old apple tree, endow these tree rooms of the Fountain Inn with charms which cannot be equally endorsed and appreciated by all who read of them; but to me they form an ideal traveller’s joy. To sit there through the long afternoon or in the early twilight, cool and half remote among the tree branches, drinking a dish of tea; watching horsemen and cartmen and sturdy pedestrians come and go, and the dashing mail-coach rattle up, a flash of color and noise and life, and pour out its motley passengers, and speedily roll away with renewed patrons and splendor—why, it was like a scene in a light opera.

Fountain Inn.

The tree abodes and the bridges fell slowly in pieces, and one great tree died; but its companion lived till 1879, when it, too, was cut down and the bald old commonplace building crowded on the dusty street stood bare and ugly, without a vestige or suggestion of past glory around it. Now that, too, is gone, and only the picture on the opposite page, of the tavern in its dying poverty, remains to show what was once the scene of so much bustle and good cheer.

The State House Inn of Philadelphia was built in 1693, and was long known as Clark’s Inn. It was a poor little building which stood in a yard, not green with grass, but white with oysters and clam shells. Its proximity to the State House gave it the custom of the members and hangers-on of the colonial assemblies. William Penn often smoked his pipe on its porch. Clark had a sign-board, the Coach and Horses, and he had something else which was as common perhaps in Philadelphia as tavern sign-boards, namely, turnspit dogs—little patient creatures, long-bodied and crook-legged, whose lives were spent in the exquisite tantalization of helping to cook the meat, whose appetizing odors of roasting they sniffed for hours without any realization of tasting at the end of their labors.

Dr. Caius, founder of the college at Cambridge, England, that bears his name, is the earliest English writer upon the dog, and he tells thus of turnspits: “Certain dogs in kitchen service excellent. When meat is to be roasted they go into a wheel, where, turning about with the weight of their bodies they so diligently look to their business that no drudge or scullion can do the feat more cunningly.” The Philadelphia landlord says in his advertisement of dogs for sale, “No clock or jack so cunningly.” The summary and inhuman mode of teaching these turnspits their humble duties is described in a book of anecdotes published at Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1809. The dog was put in the wheel. A burning coal was placed with him. If he stopped, his legs were burned. That was all. He soon learned his lesson. It was hard work, for often the great piece of beef was twice the weight of the dog, and took at least three long hours’ roasting. I am glad to know that these hard-working turn-broches usually grew shrewd with age; learned to vanish at the approach of the cook or the appearance of the wheel. At one old-time tavern in New York little brown Jesse listened daily at the kitchen doorstep while the orders were detailed to the kitchen maids, and he could never be found till nightfall on roast-meat days; nay, more, he, as was the custom of dogs in that day, went with his mistress to meeting and lay at her feet in the pew. And when the parson one Sunday chose to read and expound from the first chapter of Ezekiel, Jesse fled with silent step and slunken tail and drooping ears at the unpleasant verse, “And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them; and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up.” Naturally Jesse never suspected that these Biblical wheels were only parts of innocent allegorical chariots, but deemed them instead a very untimely and unkind reminder on a day of rest of his own hated turnspit wheel.