Buckhorn Tavern.
Rarely signs were hung from a beam stretched across the road on upright posts. It is said there are twenty-five such still remaining and now in use in England. A friend saw one at the village of Barley in Herts, the Fox and Hounds. The figures were cut out of plank and nailed to the cross-beam, the fox escaping into the thatch of the inn with hound in full cry and huntsmen following. Silhouetted against the sky, it showed well its inequality of outline. A similar sign of a livery stable in Baltimore shows a row of galloping horses.
Sometimes animals’ heads or skins were nailed on a board and used as a sign. Ox horns and deer horns were set over the door. The Buck Horn Tavern with its pair of branching buck horns is shown on the opposite page. This tavern stood on Broadway and Twenty-second Street, New York.
The proverb “Good wine needs no bush” refers to the ancient sign for a tavern, a green bush set on a pole or nailed to the tavern door. This was obsolete, even in colonial days; but in Western mining camps and towns in modern days this emblem has been used to point out the barroom or grocery whiskey barrel. The name “Green Bush” was never a favorite in America. There was a Green Bush Tavern in Barrington, Rhode Island, with a sign-board painted with a green tree.
CHAPTER VIII
THE TAVERN IN WAR
The tavern has ever played an important part in social, political, and military life, has helped to make history. From the earliest days when men gathered to talk over the terrors of Indian warfare; through the renewal of these fears in the French and Indian War; before and after the glories of Louisburg; and through all the anxious but steadfast years preceding and during the Revolution, these gatherings were held in the ordinaries or taverns. What a scene took place in the Brookfield tavern, the town being then called Quawbaug! The only ordinary, that of Goodman Ayers, was a garrison house as well as tavern, and the sturdy landlord was commander of the train-band. When the outbreak called King Philip’s War took place, things looked black for Quawbaug. Hostile and treacherous Indians set upon the little frontier settlement, and the frightened families retreated from their scarcely cleared farms to the tavern. Many of the men were killed and wounded at the beginning of the fray, but there were eighty-two persons, men, women, and children, shut up within the tavern walls, and soon there were four more, for two women gave birth to twins. The Indians, “like so many wild bulls,” says a witness, shot into the house, piled up hay and wood against the walls, and set it on fire. But the men sallied out and quenched the flames. The next night the savages renewed their attack.