CHAPTER III
THE TAVERN LANDLORD
The landlord of colonial days may not have been the greatest man in town, but he was certainly the best-known, often the most popular, and ever the most picturesque and cheerful figure. Travellers did not fail to note him and his virtues in their accounts of their sojourns. In 1686 a gossiping London bookseller and author, named John Dunton, made a cheerful visit to Boston. He did not omit to pay tribute in his story of colonial life to colonial landlords. He thus pictures George Monk, the landlord of the Blue Anchor of Boston:—
“A person so remarkable that, had I not been acquainted with him, it would be a hard matter to make any New England man believe I had been in Boston; for there was no one house in all the town more noted, or where a man might meet with better accommodation. Besides, he was a brisk and jolly man, whose conversation was coveted by all his guests as the life and spirit of the company.”
This picture of an old-time publican seems more suited to English atmosphere than to the stern air of New England Puritanism.
Sign-board of
Washington Hotel.
Grave and respectable citizens were chosen to keep the early ordinaries and sell liquor. The first “house of intertainment” at Cambridge, Massachusetts, was kept by a deacon of the church, afterward Steward of Harvard College. The first license in that town to sell wine and strong water was to Nicholas Danforth, a selectman, and Representative to the General Court. In the Plymouth Colony Mr. William Collier and Mr. Constant Southworth, one of the honored Deputies, sold wine to their neighbors. These sober and discreet citizens were men of ample means, who took the duty of wine-selling to aid the colony rather than their own incomes.