Late nineteenth century photograph of Tavern’s yard shows brick oven, split-log bench and primitive sharpening wheel.
In 1896, on the hundredth anniversary of Dayton’s founding, these women donned pioneer dress and demonstrated the skills of their mothers and grandmothers. The picture, taken in one of the two upstairs rooms at Newcom Tavern, shows spinning, knitting, use of the flax wheel and quilting.
Things were desperate—hardly secure for family life and farming—until that able general, “Mad Anthony” Wayne, led a force of 3600 daring men into Ohio country. The eventual surrender of the Miamis (led by Chief Little Turtle) resulted in the Treaty of Greenville, and the end of the strife that had kept the Valley a wilderness. The treaty was signed in 1795, a little over a decade after Ohio, as part of the Northwest Territory, had come under control of the United States, and Congress had authorized sale of the land.
In the year of the treaty, Jonathan Dayton, head of a New Jersey land company which also included Generals Wilkinson and St. Clair and a Colonel Ludlow, acquired the so-called “seventh and eighth ranges” between the two Miami Rivers, and employed surveyors to lay out a town site. The town was to take Jonathan Dayton’s name, although he was never to lay eyes on the holding. Ludlow (in the company of the surveyor, Daniel Cooper) was the only member of the land company to make the westward trek.
Newcom Tavern was one of the first structures to be erected in Dayton, and it is the oldest Dayton building now standing. Long a familiar landmark of Van Cleve Park, on Monument Avenue in downtown Dayton, the Tavern was moved to Carillon Park in the summer of 1964. Here, it is much more accessible to the public than it was in the congested business district, and it has the wooded setting that a frontier relic deserves.
It was in the spring of 1796 that three groups of settlers headed north from Cincinnati. One party came by flat boat, or pirogue, which was laboriously poled up the Miami. The other two groups came overland—one by wagon, the other on foot, leading packhorses and driving cattle.
Early household utensils include, on shelf at left, a hearth rotisserie and a foot warmer. Corn crusher stands in the corner and on shelf at right are various grinders, a dough board and a cypress knee in which salt was kept.
The latter party was led by Colonel George Newcom, a veteran of Wayne’s campaign against the redskins. Newcom immediately chose a lot on the southwest corner of Main and Water (now Monument Avenue) Streets, where the Newcom Manor apartments were later erected. He put up a one-room cabin of round logs as temporary shelter, then engaged one Robert Edgar to build a permanent house—18 by 22 feet, of square-hewn logs, with a loft above reached by a ladder. The small original shelter served as kitchen to the larger house for a while, but eventually was razed.