NEWCOM TAVERN
Col. George Newcom still revealed the flinty quality that tamed the wilderness when he sat for this daguerreotype in 1852 at the age of 81. Dayton was already a bustling town, with a classic courthouse that ranked among the country’s finest structures.
Newcom’s first cabin, of round logs instead of square-hewn logs, later served as kitchen for the structure now in Carillon Park. Smaller building disappeared many years ago. (Etching courtesy of Otterbein Press.)
By the mid-1700s, a few intrepid men from “back East” had explored the land of the Miami Indians. Upon their return to the seaboard these scouts sat about their firesides painting attractive word-pictures of the territory beyond the Alleghenies. It was “rich, level and well-timbered.” Clover, rye and bluegrass were abundant, along with enough small game, deer and wild turkey to keep any number of settlers from want. The countryside, in the words of one report, was “just waiting to be tickled with the hoe that it might laugh with a harvest.”
It was to be almost another half-century, however, before anyone packed up his wife, musket and hoe and established a home in these fertile lands of legend. The Miamis—a tribe of the Algonquin family in powerful league with the Shawnees, Wyandots, Potawatomies and the Ottawas—were determined to keep the white man off the prime hunting grounds that lay between the Great and Little Miami rivers. They frequently crossed the Ohio to raid threatening settlements in Kentucky territory, and the doughty Kentuckians in return made bloody sorties into the Indians’ Miami Valley. Two of the fiercest encounters were fought on the triangle of land where the Mad River meets the Great Miami.
1896 view of the Tavern on Monument Avenue, four years after it was moved there from the southwest corner of Main and Monument.
