Stage-coach and Tavern Days

Preserves the token and the sign.”

Massachusetts Grand Lodge organized at Green Dragon, and the first lodge of all, St. John’s Lodge, met in 1733 at the Bunch of Grapes in King (now State) Street. One of the three bunches of grapes that formed the original tavern sign still hangs in front of the lodge room of St. John’s Lodge in Masonic Temple, Boston. This tavern had an early and lasting reputation as “the best punch-house in Boston.” In Revolutionary days it became the headquarters of High Whigs, and a scarlet coat was an inflammatory signal in that taproom. The “Whig Tavern” was a proper centre for popular gatherings after the evacuation of Boston; General Stark’s victory at Bennington was celebrated there “to high taste,” says a participant. The firing of cannon, discharge of rockets, playing of fifes and drums, made satisfactory noise. The gentlemen had ample liquor within doors, and two barrels of grog were distributed to outsiders on the streets – all “with the greatest propriety.” When General Stark arrived, a few weeks later, there was equal rejoicing. The glories of the entertainment of Washington and a series of gallant soldiers and distinguished travellers do not, perhaps, reflect the honor upon the old tavern that comes from its having been the scene of a most significant fact in our history. It was the gathering place and place of organization of the Ohio Company – the first concerted movement of New England toward the Great West.

The famous Craft’s Tavern in the little town of Walpole, New Hampshire, kept by Major Asa Bullard, was the gathering place in 1796 of one of the most brilliant groups of writers ever engaged in a literary undertaking in this country. It was called the Literary Club of Walpole, and is a landmark in the literary life of New England. In this rustic New Hampshire tavern this Club might repeat Beaumont’s lines to Jonson beginning: —

“What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid, heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame.”

The head of this Yankee collection of wits was the Lay Preacher, Joseph Dennie, who, at the death of the novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, was the only man in the United States who made a profession of literature. He was born in Boston, studied law in Charlestown, New Hampshire, then an important and bustling town, went to Walpole, and became conductor of the New Hampshire Journal and Farmer’s Museum. For this newspaper and in this Craft’s Tavern he wrote his famous Lay Sermons which were read from Maine to Georgia. In the talented tavern circle was Royall Tyler, author of the play The Contrast and the novel The Algerine Captive. He became Chief Justice of Vermont. Another contributor was David Everett, author of the well-known juvenile spouting-piece, beginning: —

“You’d scarce expect one of my age
To speak in public on the stage.”

Still another, Thomas G. Fessenden, wrote Terrible Tractoration. It was a day of pseudonyms; Fessenden wrote as Simon Spunky and Christopher Caustic; Everett called himself Peter Peveril; Isaac Story was Peter Quinn; Dennie was Oliver Old-school; Tyler was Colon and Spondee.

A day of great sport at the tavern was when there was a turkey-shoot; these often took place on Thanksgiving Day. Notices such as this were frequently found in the autumnal newspapers: —

“SHARP-SHOOTING

“Thos. D. Ponsland informs his Friends and the Friends of Sport that he will on Friday, 7th day of December next, set up for Shooting a number

Fine Fat Turkeys

of and invites all Gunners and others who would wish to recreate themselves to call on the day after Thanksgiving at the Old Bakers’ Tavern, Upp. Parish Beverly, where every accommodation would be afforded.”

In the Boston Evening Post of January 11, 1773, notice was given that “a Bear and Number of Turkeys” would be set up as a mark at the Punch Bowl Tavern in Brookline.

Captain Basil Hall, travelling in America in 1827, was much surprised at the account of one of these turkey-shoots, which he thus fully describes: —

“At a country inn bearing the English name of Andover, close to the Indian river Shawsheen, I observed the following printed bill stuck up in the bar.

SPORTSMEN ATTEND300 Fowls

will be set up for the sportsmen at the Subscriber’s Hotel in Tewksbury, on Friday the 12 October, inst. at 8 A.M.

Gentlemen of Tewksbury,

Lowell and vicinity are invited to attend.

    William Hardy.

“This placard was utterly unintelligible to me; and the Landlord laughed at my curiosity but good humouredly enlightened my ignorance by explaining that these shooting matches were so common in America, that he had no doubt I would fall in with them often. I regretted very much having passed one day too late for this transatlantic battle. It appears that these birds were literally barn door fowls, placed at certain distances, and fired at by any one who chooses to pay the allotted sum for a shot. If he kills the bird, he is allowed to carry it off; otherwise, like a true sportsman, he has the amusement for his money. Cocks and hens being small birds, are placed at the distance of 165 feet; and for every shot with ball the sportsman has to pay four cents. Turkeys are placed at twice the distance, or 110 yards, if a common musket be used; but at 165 yards if the weapon be a rifle. In both those cases the price per shot is from six to ten cents.”

There were other sports offered at the taverns, as shown by an advertisement in the Essex Register of June, 1806: —

“SPORTSMEN ATTEND

The Gentlemen Sportsmen of this town and Vicinity are informed that a Grand Combat will take place between the Urus Zebu and Spanish Bull on 4th of July if fair weather. If not the next fair day at the Half Way House on the Salem Turnpike. No danger need be apprehended during the performance, as the Circus is very convenient. After the performance there will be a Grand Fox Chase on the Marshes near the Circus to start precisely at 6 o’clock.”

A woman tavern-keeper on Boston Neck, Sally Barton, of the George, also had bull-baiting as one of the attractions of her home. In 1763, the keeper of the DeLancey Arms in New York had a bull-baiting. The English officers stationed in America brought over this fashion. In the year 1774, there was a bull-baiting held every day for many months on what is now a quiet street near my home. Landlord Loosely, – most appropriately named, – of the King’s Head Tavern, took charge of these bull-baitings and advertised for good active bulls and strong dogs. One advertisement, in rhyme, begins: —

“This notice gives to all who covet
Baiting the bull, and dearly love it.”

Fox-hunting, too, was beloved of the British visitors, and of Southern planters as well. The Middle and Southern states saw frequent meets of mounted gentlemen with hounds, usually at the tavern, to which they returned after the day’s run to end with suitable jollity.

The old English “drift of the forest” became in America a wolf-rout or wolf-drive. Then circles of men and boys were formed to drive in toward the centre of the ring and kill squirrels and hares which pestered the farmers. Then came shooting matches in which every living wild creature was a prey. The extent to which these devastating hunting parties could be carried is shown by an article in a Bedford County (Pennsylvania) newspaper. On Friday, December 4, 1818, about seven hundred men from neighboring townships formed such a party. The signal was first given on French Town Mountain, and the circle of forty miles of horn blowing to horn was completed in fifteen minutes. The hunters progressed to a centre in Wysox township, using guns as long as they could with safety, then bayonets, clubs, poles, pitchforks, etc. Five bears, nine wolves, and fourteen foxes were killed, and three hundred deer – it makes one’s heart ache. It was estimated that more than double the number escaped. The expedition closed with great mirth at the tavern.

I find through many legal reports and accounts of trials and arrests, that upper rooms in the taverns were frequently used as lockups or temporary jails. Mr. S. L. Frey, of Palatine Bridge, in his charming account of olden days in that town, tells an amusing episode of tavern life connected with this custom. Near the village schoolhouse lived a man named Fisk – a quiet citizen, friendly to the boys, but given, however, to frequent disappearances, and a profound reticence as to his means of livelihood which was naturally a distinct grievance and indeed an injustice to every respectably inquisitive neighbor. The boys noted that he was a great lover of horses, and seemed to have a constant succession of new ones in his stable, and that these newcomers vanished in as silent and unaccountable a manner as they had arrived.

One morning the scholars were excited and delighted to learn that the band of horse thieves that had for years ravaged the valley had at last been ferreted out, the two leaders captured and safely lodged during the night in the village jail, namely, a doubly locked and outside bolted room in Uncle Jesse Vincent’s tavern. And the climax of all the excitement and pleasure was the fact that Neighbor Fisk was the leader of the gang.

Court was called in the tavern parlor at noon. The sheriff and his officers, lawyers from neighboring towns, all importance and pomposity, all the men and all the boys from miles around were waiting eagerly to see once more the mysterious Fisk, when a loud shout came from the men who had gone to lead forth the prisoners that both had escaped. Of course they had! An open window, a leanto roof, a trellis and a high fence, – no decent prisoner could help escaping.

But they had been startled in their plans, and hurried while exchanging clothes, and it was plain from the garments left behind that one man had vanished clad only in his shirt, stockings, and shoes. The dire confusion of the first mortifying discovery soon changed to organized plans of pursuit, and the chase turned to a great piece of woodland behind the tavern. Oak and hickory with undergrowth of witchhazel – a prime place for partridges and gray squirrels – led back from the river to the hills and a deep gorge filled with solemn pines and hemlocks.

The rampant boys were snubbed early in the day by the sheriff and told to keep back; and one tall boy – “mad” at the insult – conceived the plan of personating the thief. He was a famous runner, the best in the school. He hid his coat in a hollow log, pulled his shirt over his trousers, Chinaman fashion, worked his way around on the edge of the hunting party, and was soon “discovered” by his boy friends, whose shouts of “Stop thief!” “Here he is!” brought the whole army of searchers after him. Oh! what a hunt followed. All were on foot, for no horses could pass through the heavy undergrowth; the white flag of the pursued fluttered in and out far in front into the swamp, under the bushes. Talk of hare and hounds! no game was ever run like that. The fleet young horse thief in front easily distanced the puffing sheriffs in the rear, and at last the pursuit was given over. Fisk escaped, thanks to his friends the boys, but the story of the wrath that was visited on the conspirators when their fun was discovered the next day at the tavern is “another story.”

Sittings of courts were often held in the public room of taverns, not only in small towns where assembly rooms were few, but in large cities. From the settlement of Philadelphia till 1759, justices of peace heard and decided causes in the public inns of Philadelphia, and the Common Council had frequent sittings there. In Boston the courts were held in suburban taverns when the smallpox scourged the town. In Postlethwaite’s Tavern (shown on page 214) the first courts of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, were held in 1729, and propositions were made to make it the county seat; but the present site of the city of Lancaster was finally chosen, though Landlord Postlethwaite made strenuous endeavors to retain his tavern as a centre.

Our ancestors found in criminals and all the accompaniments of crime their chief source of diversion. They did not believe in lonely captivity but in public obloquy for criminals. The only exciting and stirring emotions which entered their lives came through the recounting of crimes and offences, and the sight of the punishment of these crimes and offences; rising of course to the highest point of excitement in witnessing the public executions of criminals. The bilboes were the first engine of punishment in Boston, and were used until 1639, and perhaps much later. The drinkers of a cup of sack at the Boston ordinary had much diversion in seeing James Woodward, who had had too much sack at the Cambridge ordinary, “laid by the heels” on the ground with a great bar of iron fastened and locked to his legs with sliding shackles and a bolt. Still more satisfaction had all honest Puritans when Thomas Morton, of Merrymount, that amusing old debauchee and roisterer, was “clapt into the bilbowes,” where “the harmless salvages” gathered around and stared at him like “poor silly lambes.”

The stocks soon superseded the bilboes and were near neighbors and amusement purveyors to the tavern. Towns were forced by law to set up “good sufficient stocks.” Warwick, Rhode Island, ordered that “John Lowe should erect the public stocks and whipping-post near David Arnold’s Tavern, and procure iron and timber for the same.” The stocks were simple to make; a heavy timber or plank had on the upper edge two half-circle holes which met two similar notches or holes in a movable upper timber. When this was in place these notches formed round holes to enclose the legs of the prisoner, who could then be locked in.

The whipping-post, a good sound British institution, was promptly set up in every town, and the sound of the cat often entered the tavern windows. I can imagine all the young folk thronging to witness the whipping of some ardent young swain who had dared to make love to some fair damsel without the consent of her parents. There was no room for the escape of any man who thus “inveagled” a girl; the New Haven colony specified that any tempting without the parents’ sanction could not be done by “speech, writing, message, company-keeping, unnecessary familiarity, disorderly night meetings, sinful dalliance, gifts, or (as a wholesale blow to lovers’ inventions) in any other way.”

But sly Puritan maids found that even the “any other way” of Puritan law-makers could be circumvented. Jacob Murline, in Hartford, on May-day in 1660, without asking any permission of Goodman Tuttle, had some very boisterous love-making with Sarah Tuttle, his daughter. It began by Jacob’s seizing Sarah’s gloves and demanding the mediæval forfeit – a kiss. “Whereupon,” writes the scandalized Puritan chronicler, “they sat down together, his arm being about her, and her arm upon his shoulder or about his neck, and hee kissed her and shee kissed him, or they kissed one another, continuing in this posture about half an hour.” The angry father, on hearing of this, haled Jacob into court and sued him for damages in “inveagling” his daughter’s affections. There were plenty of witnesses of the kissing, and Jacob seemed doomed to heavy fines and the cat-o’-nine-tails, when crafty Sarah informed the Court that Jacob did not inveigle her, that she wished him to kiss her – in fact, that she enticed him. The baffled Court therefore had to fine Sarah, and of course Sarah’s father had to pay the fine; but the magistrate called her justly a “Bould Virgin,” and lectured her severely. To all this she gave the demure answer “that she hoped God would help her to Carry it Better for time to come,” which would seem to be somewhat superfluous, since she had, without any help, seemed to do about as well for herself as any girl could wish to under the circumstances.

For some years the Quakers never were absent from the whipping-post. They were trying enough, preaching everywhere, and on all occasions, yet never willing to keep silent when the Puritan preacher held forth; not willing, even, to keep away from the Puritan meeting. They interrupted these meetings in most offensive ways, and were promptly whipped. One poor Quakeress, Lydia Wardwell, “a young tender chaste person,” but almost demented with religious excitement, was taken forcibly from the Ipswich meeting-house and “tyed to the fence-post of the Tavern,” and then sorely lashed.

The pillory sometimes took the place of the stocks. In enduring this punishment the culprit stood on a sort of bench, and his head and hands were confined in holes cut in a hinged or divisible board. Lecture day was often chosen as the day of punishment; as Hawthorne said, “it was a day of public shame, the day on which transgressors received their reward of ignominy.” Thus Nicholas Olmstead, sentenced to the pillory in Hartford “next Lecture day,” was “sett on a lytle before the beginning and to stay on a lytle after the end.” In Maryland offenders were “nayled by both eares to the Pillory, 3 Nailes in each Eare, and the Nailes to be slit out.” Samuel Breck says that in 1771, in Boston, men and women were constantly seen pilloried, exposed to insults and jeers, and pelted with filth and garbage.

The 18th of September, 1755, was a great day in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A negro woman named Phyllis was then and there burned to death – in punishment for her share in the murder of her master. The diary of a Boston gentleman still exists which shows us how he passed the day; cheerfully drinking punch from tavern to tavern, and cheerfully watching the hanging of the man-murderer and the burning of the woman. The day’s record ends: “Went home, went to bed and slept and woke up very finely refreshed.” Criminals were preached at in public, read their dying confessions in public, were carted through the streets in open tumbrils, and were hanged in public. On all those occasions the taverns flowed with good cheer and merry meetings, for people came for many miles to witness the interesting sight, and many were the happy reunions of friends.

Another bustling busy day at the tavern was when “vandues” were held within its walls. Due notice of these “vandues” had been given by posters displayed in the tavern and village store, and occasionally by scant newspaper advertisements. These auction sales were rarely of mixed merchandise, but were of some special goods, such as India cotton stuffs, foreign books, or boots and shoes. Criminals and paupers were also sold for terms of service; usually the former were some of the varied tribe of sneak-thieves which wandered through the country. In one case the human “lot” offered for sale was a “prygman” – he had, like Autolycus, stolen the bleaching linen from the grass and hedges.

Another was an habitual fruit and vegetable thief (and he must have been an extraordinary one to have been noted in a country where fruit and vegetables on every farm were so freely shared with all passers-by). Another, an Indian, stole from the lobster and eel pots of his honest white neighbors. A sheep thief, sold at public auction in Clifford’s Tavern in Dunbarton, New Hampshire, took part in an interesting prologue, as well as in the main performance, in the shape of a whipping of thirteen stripes administered to him by the vigorous sheriff. Nevertheless, he found a purchaser, who took his subdued and sore servant home to his farm and set him to breaking and hatchelling flax. The convict fell to work as cheerfully and assiduously as any honest laborer, but when he had cleaned as much flax as he could carry, he added an unexpected epilogue to this New England comedy by departing with his dressed flax for parts unknown; thus proving that he laughs best who laughs last. Though it would seem that the selectmen of the town, who had been amply paid “damages and costs” through his sale, and who had also effectually banished a rogue from their township, might join with him in a mirthful chorus.

The sale of paupers at the tavern was much more frequent than of criminals. It was an exhibition of curious contrasts: the prosperous and thirsty townsmen drinking at the tavern bar, and the forlorn group of homeless, friendless creatures, usually young children and aged folk, waiting to be sold to the lowest bidder for a term of feeble service and meagre keep. The children were known after the sale as “bound boys” and “bound girls,” and much sympathy has been expended in modern books over the hardness of their lives, and many pathetic stories written of them. This method was, however, as good a solution of the problem of infant pauperism as we have yet discovered. The children were removed from vicious associations in almshouses, and isolated in homes where they had to work just as the daughters and sons of the household worked. In many cases they entered childless homes, and grew to be the prop and happiness of their adopted parents, and the heirs of their little savings. The auction at the tavern was frankly brutal, but the end accomplished was so satisfactory that the custom has within a few years been resumed by the more advanced and thoughtful guardians of paupers in many New England towns. As for the auction sale of aged and infirm paupers, it is not wholly a thing of the past. In Lackawanna township in Pike County, Pennsylvania, paupers still are sold to the lowest bidder. A year ago, in 1899, at Rowland Station in that township the signs were posted, “A Woman for Sale,” and as of old the “vandue” was held at a tavern, one called Rutan’s Hotel. The bar-room was crowded, and Mrs. Elmira Quick, seventy-seven years old, was put up “to be sold to the lowest bidder for keep for a year.” The bidding was spirited and ran quickly down from four dollars a week. A backwoodsman had just offered to take her for a dollar and a half a week, when Mrs. Quick firmly bid a dollar and a quarter. The Overseer of the Poor hesitated, but Mrs. Quick stated she could maintain herself on that amount – sixteen cents a day – and no one made an offer to take her for less; so he was forced to conclude the bargain and draw up the sale-papers. Let me add that this woman has three sons and a daughter living – and these are our good new times.

CHAPTER X

FROM PATH TO TURNPIKE

The first roads in New England are called in the early court-records “trodden paths.” They were narrow worn lines, scarce two feet wide, lightly trodden over pine needles and fallen leaves among the tree trunks by the soft moccasined foot of the tawny savages as they walked silently in Indian file through the forests. These paths were soon deepened and worn bare by the heavy hobnailed shoes of the white settlers, others were formed by the slow tread of domestic cattle, the best of all path makers, as they wound around the hillsides to pasture or drinking place. Then a scarcely broader bridle-path for horses, perhaps with blazed trees as guide-posts, widened slowly to travelled roads and uneven cart-ways. These roads followed and still wind to-day in the very lines of the foot-path and the cattle-track.

The early colonists walked as did their predecessors, the Indians, on their own stout legs, when they travelled by land. We find even the governors of the colonies walking off sturdily into the forests; crossing the rivers and brooks on fallen trees; and sometimes being carried across “pick-a-back” by vigorous Indian guides. We have one record of Governor Winthrop in that dependent and rather un-governor-like attitude, and it is well to think of this picture of him as affording a glimpse of one of the human sides of his life, to balance the prevailing Chinese worship and idealization of him and our other ancestors.